DE  WITT    -    BOOKSELLER 

1609TELEQRAPH    OAKLAND,  CAL. 

620    FOURTEENTH 


SUPPRESSED    CHAPTERS 

AND   OTHER   BOOKISHNESS 


BY 

ROBERT  BRIDGES 

AUTHOR  OF  "OVERHEARD  IN  ARCADY 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1895 


-2>  *5") 

^ 

TROW    DIRECTORY 
PRINTING  AND   BOOKBINDING  CO* 
NEW  YORK 


CONTENTS 


A  New  Dolly  Dialogue,  •  3 

Trilby  s  Christmas,         ...  -7 

Narcissus  and  Hesper  on  Wheels,         .  .  n 

Little  Wayoff,          .  •  *S 

Lost  Chords,    ...  -  lS 

Buy  the  Idiot  Brand,     .  •  21 

Some  Remarks  of  Major  Brace,   .  .  24 


(Jrcabicm 

To   Terence  Mulvaney  ......  29 

To  Evadne  Galbraith  ......  32 

To  Diana  of  the  Crossways,  Surrey,     .         .  36 

To  One  who  is   Tired  of  Reading,         .         .  40 

To  Jean  at   Twenty-two,         .         ,         .         .  43 

To  a  Certain  Critic,       .....  46 

To  a  Friend  Starting  on  a  Vacation,  .         .  49 
v 


388383 


(Jtofjefe  tfat  (BueraBobg  (Keab 


PAGE 


Lord  Ormont  and  his  Aininta,     .         .         -55 
The  Manxman,       ......     58 

Trilby,     ........     61 

Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles,       .         .         .         .65 

The  Prisoner  of  Zenda,          .         .         .         .68 

Ships  that  Pass  in  the  Night,       .         .         .     77 
Katharine  Lauderdale,  .         .         .         .         -74 

The  Jungle  Book,   ......     78 

Pembroke  ........     81 

David  Bal  four,        ......     84 

fciferarg  ^partition  of  Jkoffcmb 

The  Literary  Partition  of  Scotland,  .  .  89 
J.  M.  Barrie  ........  91 

S.  R.  Crockett,          ......     96 

Ian  Maclaren,  ......  100 


n 

Charles  Dana  Gibson,     .....  105 

A.  B.  Frost,     .......  108 

F.  Marion  Crawford,     .....  7/5 

Henry  van  Dyke,   ......  ijo 

vi 


Opinions  PAGE 

Summer  Reading, fJ7 

Sanf  Ilario  in  Camp 14° 

A  Legend  of  the  Happy  Valley,    .         .         .144 

A  Plea  for  Diana, 14$ 

A  Cure  for  the  Malady  of  Cleverness,          .  134 
The  Patriotic  Novel, 157 


VI 1 


SUPPRESSED   CHAPTERS 


A  NEW  DOLLY  DIALOGUE 

WITH  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  TO  ANTHONY  HOPE,  AUTHOR  OF 
"THE  PRISONER  OF  ZENDA,"  "THE  DOLLY  DIALOGUES," 
ETC.,  ETC. 

IT'S  a  small  world,"  said  Dolly,  pouring  the  tea 
slowly  that  I  might  admire   the  curve   of  her 
wrist. 

"  But  large  enough  to  hold  the  one  woman  in  the 
world  for  me,  Lady  Mickleham,"  I  ventured,  as  I 
turned  my  back  upon  her  and  looked  out  of  the  win 
dow,  while  I  lighted  a  cigarette. 

"  Oh,  is  she  the  gardener's  daughter  walking  down 
by  the  greenhouses?"  asked  Dolly,  with  her  usual 
pique. 

"At  any  rate  she  is  a  hot-house  product,"  I 
drawled,  "  ripened  by  sunshine,  flattery,  wealth,  and 
culture. ' ' 

"  Coveted  by  many,  and  loved  by  none!  "  vent 
ured  Dolly. 

"  Owned  by  nobody  and  loved  by  one,"  said  I, 
sadly. 

Lady  Mickleham  looked  pensively  into  the  bottom 
of  her  tea-cup. 

3 


"You  are  only  making  phrases,"  at  length  said 
Dolly. 

"  And  that  is  better  than  making  love,  Lady 
Mickleham." 

<  'You  can't  speak  with  authority,"  flashed  Dolly, 
1 '  for  you  always  make  phrases  but  never  make  love  !  ' ' 

11  Except  to  another  man's  wife,"  I  added,  with 
a  glance  at  Dolly. 

"  Because  it  can  never  commit  you  to  matrimony," 
she  remarked.  "You  never  mean  business,"  she 
added,  spitefully. 

"Love  is  an  art  and  not  a  trade,  Lady  Mickle 
ham.  Business  is  for  common  people." 

"  Now  you  are  talking  like  Mr.  Hope,"  snapped 
Dolly.  "I  met  him  the  other  night  at  the  Dowa 
ger's,  and  all  his  sentences  were  built  like  that." 

"Rethinks  the  modern  young  woman  likes  that 
kind,"  I  mused. 

"Why?" 

<  <  Because  it   passes  for  cleverness,  Lady  Mickle 
ham,  and  we  brutes  like  to  think  that  you  are  clever." 

"  Aren't  we,  Mr.  Brute  ?  " 

"  You  are  always  cleverer  than  you  seem,"  I  re 
plied,  sententiously. 

"But  Mr.  Hope  makes  us  seem  cleverer  than  we 
are,"  affirmed  Dolly. 

"  Mr.  Hope  does  not  half  know  you"  said  I,  hop 
ing  that  Dolly  might  grasp  the  delicate  compliment. 

Dolly  poured  another  cup  of  tea  with  her  left  hand, 
showing  another  equally  beautiful  wrist. 
4 


"  I  wonder  if  Mr.  Hope  ever  met  a  woman  who 
would  listen  to  a  man  who  spoke  in  epigrams  for  five 
continuous  minutes?"  I  mused  as  I  lighted  another 
cigarette. 

"There  never  was  such  a  man,"  replied  Dolly. 
"  When  men  talk  they  orate  for  ten  minutes,  and  ex 
pect  the  women  to  listen  in  rapt  attention." 

"That's  to  prevent  the  women  from  chattering," 
said  I,  with  rare  courtesy. 

"  The  talk  of  the  advanced  young  woman  of  so 
ciety  is  not  chatter,"  cut  in  Dolly. 

"It's  worse  !  " 

"What?" 

"Vulgar,"  I  murmured,  with  my  eyes  on  Dolly's 
little  curls. 

There  was  silence  for  the  space  of  half  a  minute. 

"  The  women  in  Mr.  Hope's  stories  are  not  vul 
gar,"  at  length  ventured  Dolly. 

"  Atrociously  smart,"  said  I. 

"Why  can't  we  say  bright  things?"  queried 
Dolly. 

"  You  do — but  not  in  modern  novels." 

"Why?" 

1 '  You  are  simply  allowed  to  ask  conundrums  for 
the  men  to  answer  in  double-headed  epigrams,"  I 
replied. 

"  But  don't  men  like  to  think  that  they  are  giving 
women  a  lot  of  superior  information  ?  ' '  asked  Dolly, 
glancing  out  of  the  corners  of  her  eyes. 

"  We  do  like  to  patronize  you,"  I  admitted,  in  a 
'  5 


moment  of  rare  generosity.  < '  But  we  also  like  to 
love  you,"  I  added,  pensively. 

"Well,  and  aren't  we  lovable?"  Dolly  asked, 
with  a  bewitching  smile. 

"Not  in  current  fiction,"  I  said.  "There  you 
are  blase,  inquisitive,  and  immodest,"  I  continued, 
showing  unusual  warmth. 

"  Not  all  that  !  "  protested  Dolly. 

"More,  much  more,"  said  I,  walking  toward  the 
chimney-place.  "  Your  talk  is  like  the  crackling  of 
thorns  under  a  pot,  and  you  hope  to  enter  the  king 
dom  of  knowledge  by  way  of  the  backstairs  of  im 
pertinent  frankness.  You  wish  to  make  men  admire 
and  respect  you  by  talking  of  subjects  that  they  re 
serve  for  their  grosser  moments." 

"  Now  you  are  horrid,  perfectly  horrid,  and  you 
may  go  home,"  said  Dolly,  petulantly. 

"  Would  you  drive  me  away  from  you  to  the 
women  of  those  books  ?  "  I  asked,  gently. 

' l  You  may  stay, ' '  said  Dolly,  as  she  poured  an 
other  cup  of  tea  with  both  wrists. 


TRILBY'S   CHRISTMAS 

IT  was  on  the  night  of  that  famous  Christmas  supper 
in  the  place  St.  Anatole  des  Arts,  when  Zouzou 
and  the  others  had  sung  their  songs  and  the  three 
policemen  were  laid  out  in  a  stupor  behind  the  stove, 
that  the  Laird  and  Taffy  and  Trilby  and  Little  Billee 
had  a  little  conversation  (as  they  sat  apart  on  the 
model  throne  eating  their  plum-pudding)  that  is  not 
recorded  in  the  book. 

"  Ay,  maun,"  said  the  Laird,  "  but  they're  mak 
ing  a  fuss  about  us  in  America  !  " 

"  It's  all  on  account  of  Trilby,"  said  Little  Billee, 
with  a  fond  look  at  her  knuckle-bone  teeth. 

"  They  are  all  palavering  a  lot  of  tommy-rot  about 
me,"  cut  in  Trilby,  speaking  in  her  best  English, 
which  she  learned  from  her  Irish  father,  and  which 
was  classical,  though  it  smacked  of  County  Cork. 

"Worse  than  that,  my  dear  Trilby,"  said  Taffy, 
whirling  Svengali  around  his  head  like  an  Indian 
club,  between  drinks.  "Lots  of  pretty  women  over 
there,  I  am  told,  are  raving  over  you  simply  because 
they  think  it  is  '  advanced  '  and  '  up  to  date  '  to  ad- 
7 


mire  a  woman  whom  they  are  pleased  to  think  a  little 
bit  wicked." 

"Me  wicked!  "  shrieked  Trilby,  her  Irish  up— 
"and  me  the  best  blanchisseuse  dc  fin  in  the  Quar- 
tier  Latin." 

"  It  isn't  the  laundry  work  that  attracts  their  ad 
miration,  my  lass,"  said  the  Laird,  in  his  most  father 
ly  manner.  "It's  the  posing  for  'the  altogether' 
and  several  other  little  incidents  in  your  career  that 
make  you  interesting  for  them." 

"Oh,"  said  Trilby,  in  real  distress,  "I've  been 
trying  for  months  to  forget  all  those  things,  and  now 
I  am  to  become  a  literary  classic  on  account  of  them  ! ' ' 
(Trilby  caught  the  fine  language  from  the  lamented 
O'Ferrall  when  he  was  loquacious  in  his  cups.) 

"  The  penalty  of  fame,"  said  the  philosophic  Laird, 
"  is  to  be  indiscriminately  praised,  and  generally  for 
the  wrong  thing.  I  suppose  that  I  shall  be  remem 
bered  longer  for  my  singing  of  '  The  Laird  of  Cock- 
pen  '  than  for  my  Royal  Academy  pictures." 

"Which  is  right,"  growled  Taffy,  who  had  re 
cently  come  from  Barbizon.  "The  Royal  Acad 
emy  seldom  confers  immortality  on  a  worthy  paint 
er." 

"  Those  Americans  don't  seem  to  love  Trilby  for 
the  things  that  make  us  love  her,"  piped  up  Little 
Billee.  "  They  talk  and  write  a  great  deal  about  the 
mere  accidental  things  in  her  character,  but  they 
don't  see  that  we  all  love  her  because  she  is  simply  a 
royal,  good  comrade  with  no  frills  about  her — with 
8 


a  man's  standard  of  honor,  which  she  keeps  to  the 
uttermost." 

"Little  Billee,"  cried  Trilby,  reaching  for  him 
with  her  slipper,  "  in  the  language  of  an  American 
friend  of  mine,  you're  a  chump  !  " 

"  The  trouble  with  Billee,"  mused  Taffy,  «  is  that 
he  is  too  high  strung,  and  does  not  take  exercise 
enough.  He  is  just  the  sort  of  a  fellow  who  generally 
'  dies  for  love '  in  novels.  It  isn't  nice,  and  there  is 
no  need  for  it  in  novels  or  real  life.  Five  miles  a  day 
on  a  trotting  horse  will  save  his  life. ' ' 

"  Trilby  will  save  my  life,"  sighed  Billee,  with  a 
tender  glance  at  her  freckles. 

"  The  worst  thing  I've  heard  said  about  our  good 
friend,  Du  Maurier,  who  is  bound  to  make  us  fa 
mous,"  said  Taffy,  switching  away  from  the  sentimen 
tal  Billee,  "  is  that  he  writes  neither  good  English 
nor  good  French,  but  a  mixture  of  the  slang  of  each, 
which  thirty  years  from  now  will  be  almost  unintel 
ligible  without  a  glossary." 

"And  yet  they  call  it  a  revival  of  the  style  of 
Thackeray  !  "  snorted  the  Laird. 

"  We  must  not  pick  our  friends  to  pieces  on  Christ 
mas  night,"  said  Taffy,  rising.  "  What  the  story  of 
our  old  studio  is  teaching  them  over  in  England  and 
America  is  that  there  is  nothing  in  this  world  to  be 
compared  to  the  loyal  comradeship  of  men,  and 
women  too,  who  love  each  other  as  brothers,  who 
seize  the  day  of  pleasure  as  it  passes,  and  stand  closer 
together  when  the  night  of  sorrow  comes.  Up  all  of 
9 


you  !  Dodor,  Gecko,  Zouzou — Drink  the  Christmas 
toast.  Here's  to  my  friend  and  my  brother — all 
mankind !  (Sings) 


"  Drink,  every  one  ; 
Pile  up  the  coals, 
Fill  the  red  bowls, 
Round  the  old  tree  !  " 


10 


NARCISSUS  AND  HESPER  ON  WHEELS 

WITH     ACKNOWLEDGMENTS     TO     RICHARD     LE    GALLIENNE, 
AUTHOR   OF    "THE    BOOK-BILLS    OF    NARCISSUS.'' 

WHEN  Narcissus  asked  Hesper  to  go  a-wheeling, 
there  had  been  a  great  thaw  in  midwinter  that 
cleared  the  streets  of  snow,  and  then  a  keen  frost  that 
made  them  all  crisp  and  hard  and  smooth  as  any  poet 
and  his  maid  could  wish.  The  sun  was  shining  very 
bright  and  the  sky  was  waving  its  blue  over  them  ; 
the  eyes  of  Hesper  were  very  bright  and  blue  also 
with  the  joy  of  living  on  such  a  day.  But  Narcissus 
thought  it  was  the  light  of  love  in  her  eyes.  Now, 
as  everybody  knows,  Narcissus  is  a  vain  man. 

The  talk  began  at  the  foot  of  a  long  hill  that  over 
looks  a  broad  river  reaching  to  the  sea.  They  had 
chattered  before  about  tires,  and  high  gears,  and  up- 
curve  handle-bars  ;  but  when  they  reached  the  foot  of 
the  hill  and  caught  the  first  glimpsfc  of  the  river  that 
was  to  broaden  and  sweep  into  great  majesty  as  they 
ascended  the  hill,  they  knew  that  they  must  talk.  For 
Narcissus  thought  he  was  a  poet,  and  Hesper  half-be 
lieved  him. 

''It  is  a  very  long  hill,"  said  Hesper,  with  her 
ii 


wistful  eyes  on  the  summit,  "  and  I  am  glad  that  I  am 
not  to  take  it  alone." 

"  Life  is  a  longer  hill,"  said  Narcissus,  with  a  sigh, 
"  and  we  are  taking  it  alone." 

"  We  don't  have  to,"  chirped  Hesper,  with  a  dan 
gerous  twinkle  in  her  eyes. 

"  Some  of  us  do,"  still  sighed  Narcissus.  "We 
are  philosophers." 

"  The  wisest  men  have  always  wed,"  called  Hes 
per,  in  little  trilling  catches,  as  she  panted  over  a 
hummock  in  the  road. 

Then  they  reached  a  short  level  place  about  half 
way  up,  and  Narcissus  said  that  they  would  stop  a 
while,  and  he  would  tell  her  why  !  So  they  leaned 
across  their  saddles  looking  in  each  other's  eyes. 

"I've  thought  it  all  out,"  said  Narcissus,  in  his 
most  oracular  manner,  "and  this  is  Wisdom  :  Love 
is  no  doubt  the  finest  expression  of  the  joy  of  life.  It 
is  not  a  delusion,  but  a  very  real  thing  while  it  lasts. 
But  every  man  who  has  lived  thirty  years  knows  that 
the  joy  of  life  is  an  affair  of  youth.  It  is  mind  and 
heart  and  body  all  awake  to  new  sensations.  Very 
well,"  he  continued,  as  though  Hesper  were  agreeing 
with  him,  "  we  know  then  that  for  the  forty  or  fifty 
years  that  are  left*  .us  of  living  we  must  see  and  feel 
the  glory  fade  from  the  spectacle  of  the  world.  In 
stead  of  being  a  spontaneous  joy,  life  is  to  gradually 
become  a  cool,  gray  monotony  of  living.  At  its  very 
best  it  is  that — even  without  the  stings  of  misfortune 
that  may  be  added  to  it. ' ' 

12 


"  Well,  what  of  it  ?  "  asked  Hesper.  "  What  has 
that  to  do  with  the  marriage  question  ?  " 

"  Everything  !  If  a  man  must  not  only  endure 
this  forty  years  of  growing  old  for  himself,  but  see 
the  woman  he  loves  and  worships  going  down  the 
same  gray  walk  to  death — is  he  not  in  a  tenfold  more 
tragical  plight  ?  And  the  more  he  loves  her,  if  he  is 
a  man  of  sensitive  feeling,  the  more  he  must  suffer. 
It  is  not  a  crisis  of  a  day,  an  accident  of  fortune  to  be 
met  and  conquered — that  is  easy  ;  but  it  is  all  there 
is  of  life — immitigably  all !  " 

"And  to  escape  that  increased  anguish  you  would 
voluntarily  choose  to  let  the  woman  you  love  go  her 
'  gray  walk  to  death  '  alone  ?  ' '  asked  Hesper. 

"  Surely — that  is  wisdom  for  both." 

"Oh,  you  cowardly,  selfish  man  !  "  she  hurled  at 
him,  with  snapping  eyes.  "  You  call  love  '  the  finest 
expression  of  the  joy  of  life,'  and  yet  you  would  miss 
it  for  a  year-and-a-day,  simply  that  for  a  score  or 
more  of  years  you  may  in  tranquil  loneliness  watch 
the  color  and  sunlight  fade  from  the  landscape,  with 
no  woman  to  bother  you  about  her  own  views  of  the 
spectacle.  You  are  the  final  product  of  luxurious 
sophistry.  You  don't  deserve  this  one  hour  of  sun 
shine  and  glorious  exercise,  let  alone  the  view  of  the 
river  yonder.  You  can't  always  have  these  things 
either,  and  yet  you  seize  and  enjoy  them  when  you 
may  !  Why  not  love  also  ?  Give  me  a  year  of  per 
fect  companionship  with  the  man  I  love,  and  the  rest 
of  life  may  be  as  gray  as  it  pleases  fate  to  send  it. 
13 


For  me  it  will  always  glow  with  the  memory  of  that 
year  !  " 

Hesper  was  on  fire  with  anger,  and  she  left  him  and 
wheeled  furiously  up  the  hill. 

Now  Narcissus  was  a  strong  man,  as  well  as  vain 
and  selfish,  and  within  a  few  yards  he  overtook  her 
fleeing  and  struggling  on  a  steep  place.  He  reached 
one  hand  to  her  saddle,  and  so  gently  pushed  her 
over  the  steep  place  and  up  to  the  summit,  that,  when 
they  stood  in  an  embrasure  of  the  wall  at  the  top  and 
looked  out  at  the  glorious  river,  she  had  already  half 
forgiven  him. 

"It  was  good  of  you  to  do  that  after  I  had  said 
angry  words  to  you,"  she  said. 

"  Oh,  I  have  a  great  deal  of  strength  to  spare," 
said  Narcissus,  vainly. 

"  Don't  you  think  you  might  have  enough  strength 
to  spare  for  the  woman  you  really  loved  to  last  you 
for  the  rest  of  your  life?"  laughed  Hesper  in  his 
very  face.  Then  she  whirled  away  down  the  steep 
hill  like  a  swallow  dipping  to  the  level  of  the  river. 

And  whether  Narcissus  ever  overtook  her  to  answer 
the  question,  I  know  not. 


LITTLE   WAYOFF 

WITH    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS     TO     HKNRIK     IBSEN,    AUTHOR    OF 
"LITTLE  BYOLF,"    "A   DOLL'S   HOUSE,"    ETC. 

SCENE — A  summer-house  overlooking  a  Norwegian  Fjord.  ALL- 
MERS  and  his  wife  RITA  seated  within,  looking  out  to  sea,  and 
earnestly  conversing. 

nLLMERS  :  You  must  realize  once  for  all,  Rita, 
that  I  am  seriously  afflicted  with  the  disease  of 
the  decade — Ibsenism — and  you  must  conform  your 
life  to  that  new  condition. 

RITA  :  Yes,  yes — I'll  try,  dear.  What  is  this  aw 
ful  malady  ? 

ALLMERS  :  Ibsenism  is  the  yellow  jaundice  of  the 
soul. 

RITA  :  Horrors  !  Is  there  no  remedy  suggested  in 
all  the  books  of  your  great  library  ? 

ALLMERS  (solemnly]  :  None.  The  peculiarity  of 
the  disease  is  that  no  one  who  catches  it  wants  to  be 
cured. 

RITA  :  What  !  Are  you  content  to  live  the  rest 
of  your  life  seeing  things  sicklied  o'er  with  a  yellow- 
green  light  ? 

ALLMERS  :  Not  only  content  but  glad  to  do  it  ! 
15 


The  intellect  demands  this  sacrifice  of  the  man  who 
is  truly  wise. 

RITA  :  But  I  am  naturally  of  a  hopeful  disposition. 
I  love  sunshine  and  joy  and  good-fellowship.  True, 
I  am  temporarily  depressed  by  the  drowning  of  our 
only  son,  Little  Wayoff,  but  I  think  that  in  time  I 
might  begin  to  smile  again  if  you  would  only  love  me 
as  you  used. 

ALLMERS  (impressively) :  Love  is  the  temporary 
insanity  of  the  emotions  !  I  am  sane. 

RITA  :  But  once  you  loved  me  passionately,  and 
we  were  very  happy. 

ALLMERS  :  Yes,  yes — happiness  is  the  final  expres 
sion  of  insanity.  The  truly  healthy  man  is  never 
happy. 

RITA  (with  resignation)  :  Well,  then,  I'll  try  hard 
to  be  miserable  enough  to  be  a  congenial  companion 
for  you.  Only  tell  me  the  way. 

ALLMERS  :  First  of  all  you  must  rake  through  the 
records  of  the  past  for  all  the  diseases,  crimes,  and  ter 
rible  weaknesses  of  your  ancestors.  When  you  have 
discovered  them,  carefully  ponder  over  them,  for  by 
the  immutable  Laws  of  Nature  you  have  inherited 
them  all  and  carry  them  around  in  your  beautiful 
body.  They  are  liable  to  break  out  at  any  time, 
singly  or  all  together. 

RITA  {frightened  to  death)  :  Save  me,  save  me 
dear  !  Am  I  truly  only  a  mausoleum  for  the  dead 
past  of  my  family  ? 

ALLMERS  (sternly}  :  You  are  all  that  and  more  too. 
16 


Nature  always  adds  a  few  frills  to  inherited  weakness 
and  crime  on  her  own  account.  By  the  law  of  the 
universe  you  ought  to  be  a  little  worse  than  any  of 
your  ancestors. 

RITA  (in  despair}  :  That  settles  it  !  I  don't  want 
to  live  any  longer.  Throw  me  in  the  fjord  yonder 
to  help  feed  the  pretty  fishes  along  with  Little  Way- 
off.  Oh,  my  boy,  my  boy,  your  mother  comes  to 
you  !  (Rushes  toward  the  edge  of  the  cliff. .} 

ALLMERS  (catching  her)  :  Stay  !  Do  you  really 
want  to  die? 

RITA  :  Yes,  believe  me,  yes  !  Who  could  live  in 
such  a  world  as  this  ! 

ALLMERS  (with  a  gleam  of  pleasure  in  his  eyes}  : 
Come  to  my  arms,  my  own  love  !  Now,  at  last,  are 
you  my  true  soul-mate.  Under  the  shadow  of  this 
awful  gloom  we  can  go  through  the  world  together, 
doing  our  little  best  to  thicken  the  sorrow  and  de 
spair  wherever  we  find  it.  This  is  our  destiny.  Come. 
{Embraces  her.~} 

RITA  :  And  after  thirty  or  forty  years  of  this  gloom 
we  may  be  fitted  to  join  our  beloved  Little  Wayoff  in 
another  world  ? 

ALLMERS  :   Perhaps,  perhaps  ! 

[CURTAIN.] 


LOST    CHORDS 

WITH    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS    TO    GEORGE    EGERTON,    AUTHOR 
OF   "  DISCORDS." 

SHE  sits  on  a  fallen  log  by  the  banks  of  a  tumbling 
mountain  brook ;  the  air  is  filled  with  the  odor 
of  fir,  and  the  glint  of  sunshine  is  on  the  moss,  and 
in  her  gray  eyes,  and  upon  her  bronze-gold  hair. 
This  unequalled  combination  of  moss  and  sunshine 
and  feminine  loveliness  is  enough  to  stir  to  its  depths 
the  heart  of  any  man.  How  much  more  the  heart  of 
the  impressionable  poet  at  her  feet  ! 

"  You  see  in  me,"  she  said  to  him,  in  her  trumpet- 
voice,  "  the  embodiment  of  the  new  idea  of  woman 
hood.  Once  my  life  was  nearly  wrecked  by  '  ignor 
ant  innocence.'  I've  risen  to  my  present  serene 
altitude  by  a  thorough  course  of 'all-seeing  knowl 
edge.  '  When  I  say  knowledge  you  must  understand 
that  I  refer  to  all  the  evil  and  wickedness  in  which 
men  are  habitually  engaged.  A  three-years'  course 
in  the  study  of  vice  has,  it  is  true,  disillusionized  me 
— but  it  has  made  me  strong  !  ' ' 

As  she  said  this  she  tossed  a  bowlder  into  the  tum 
bling  stream  with  her  left  hand,  then  placidly  brushed 
18 


the  dust  from  her  great  fingers  with  one  of  the  ribbons 
of  her  very  simple-,  but  perfectly  correct,  Paris-made 
gown. 

"Tell  me,"  asked  the  poet,  with  beseeching  eyes, 
"  what  are  all  these  vicious  things  that  I  must  under 
stand  before  I  can  be  strong  ?  Pity  my  ignorance. 
You  know  that  I  have  been  five  years  at  Eton, 
where  I  was  captain  of  our  football  team,  and  four 
years  at  Oxford,  where  I  wTas  stroke  of  the  'Varsity 
crew — but  what  I  know  is  nothing  when  compared  to 
you.  Vice  and  wickedness  are  neither  required  nor 
elective  at  Oxford.  Please  pity  me  !  You  know  that 
I  have  no  sister  to  warn  me  of  the  cruel  and  wicked 
world." 

"  Poor  fellow  !  "  she  replied,  softening  her  voice  to 
the  mellow  tones  of  thunder.  ' f  How  many  promis 
ing  young  men  are  lost  because  they  have  no  sisters 
to  warn  them  of  the  sinfulness  of  the  great  world  ! 
I'll  be  a  sister  to  you,  my  dear  boy." 

Saved !  murmured  the  brook,  as  it  tumbled  along 
into  the  valley.  Saved !  And  the  wind  in  the  firs 
caught  up  the  melody  and  added  to  it — Saved,  for 
she  knows  it  all ! 

The  poet  ventured  near  enough  to  kiss  the  hem  of 
her  Paris  gown.  Then  in  a  kind,  sisterly  way  she 
told  him  of  all  the  outrageously  wicked  things  she 
had  discovered  during  her  period  of  regeneration. 

"But,  oh,  my  dear  sister,"  said  the  poet,  blush 
ing  from  head  to  foot  all  over  his  puny  six-feet-two 
of  manly  strength,  "  must  I  do  all  these  wicked  things 
19 


before  I  can  be  considered  strong  enough  to  battle 
with  the  world  ?  ' ' 

She  looked  unutterable  things  at  him  with  her 
great  eyes,  and  slowly  said  :  "  Know  you  not  that  it 
is  only  for  a  few  of  the  great,  soulful  spirits  of  the 
world  to  do  these  things  !  But  for  most  women  and  all 
men  it  is  enough  for  their  regeneration  that  they  sim 
ply  read  about  them  thoroughly,  and,  if  they  have  the 
talent,  write  books  about  them  for  innocent  boys  and 
girls  to  read  by  the  sweet  and  gentle  fireside  of  home. ' ' 

"  But  don't  you  think  their  mothers  might  object 
to  their  reading  such  books  ? ' '  ventured  the  poet, 
doubtfully. 

"Mothers!"  she  shrieked,  scornfully.  "Don't 
speak  to  me  of  mothers  !  Oh,  the  crimes  of  igno 
rance  that  are  committed  in  their  name  !  Mothers 
are  women  who  habitually  associate  with  Men — think 
of  it,  great,  gross,  wicked  Men — who  actually  pay 
their  rent  and  buy  household  supplies  for  them,  and 
feed  and  clothe  their  children ;  yea,  and  even  send 
them  to  school  and  college.  Think  of  a  woman  who 
will  accept  these  favors  from  a  man,  and  then  talk  to 
me  of  mothers  !  My  boy,  my  boy,  how  far  you  are 
from  the  kingdom  of  the  new  womanhood  !  Go,  I 
cannot  talk  to  you  more  now.  Some  day,  if  you  re 
turn  to  me  scarred  with  crime,  I  may  venture  again 
to  associate  with  you.  But  not  now — you  contam 
inate  me  with  your  presence.  Go  !  " 

The  poet  kissed  the  hem  of  her  garment  again,  and 
vanished  amid  the  trees. 

20 


"BUY  THE   IDIOT  BRAND" 

WITH   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS    TO    JOHN     KENDRICK    BANGS,    AU 
THOR   OF    "COFFEE   AND    REPARTEE,1'    "THE    IDIOT,"    ETC. 

"  I_f  E'RE  going  to  start  a  great  Consolidated  Amer- 

ll  lean  Humor  Factory,"  said  the  Idiot,  as  he 
caromed  on  a  buckwheat-cake  and  hit  the  sausage 
square.  This  off-hand  remark  immediately  gained 
the  attention  of  Mrs.  Pedagog's  breakfast -table. 

"  Who  are  we?  "  asked  the  Bibliomaniac  with  his 
usual  undercurrent  of  scepticism. 

"Bangs  and  I,"  said  the  Idiot,  as  he  pocketed 
buckwheat-cake  No.  i,  and  drew  No.  2  into  fine  po 
sition. 

"  What  Bangs?  John  Kendrick  Bangs,  the  humor 
ist?"  asked  the  Poet,  in  wide-eyed  astonishment. 
' '  Do  you  know  a  real  live  author  ?  ' ' 

"The  same,"  said  the  Idiot,  playing  for  position 
on  the  left  rail  of  his  plate.  "  Bangs  and  I  are  bosom 
friends.  You  must  understand  that  John  Kendrick 
Bangs  who  writes  for  the  great  magazines,  J.  K. 
Bangs  of  the  Sunday  papers,  Carlyle  Smith  of  the 
comic  weeklies,  J.  Kendrick  Bangs  of  the  Yonkers 
Citizen,  and  John  K.  Bangs  the  politician,  are  one 

21 


and  the  same  individual.      I  am  the  bosom  friend  of 
the  whole  aggregation." 

"  The  aggregation  must  be  shy  of  bosom  friends 
when  it  takes  you,"  sniffed  Mr.  Pedagog. 

"Wrong  again,  as  usual,  Mr.  Pedagog,"  chirped 
the  Idiot  as  he  reached  for  the  maple  syrup  and  dug 
the  old  gentleman  in  the  ribs.  "  I'm  a  very  profit 
able  friend  and  Bangs  knows  a  good  thing  when  he 
sees  it.  That's  why  I  am  in  on  the  ground  floor  of 
the  Consolidated  American  Humor  Factory.  Great 
idea,  great  head,  great  man  !  " 

"  Doubt  it,"  grunted  the  School-master.  "  Your 
adjectives  are  always  ten  sizes  too  large  for  your  ideas. ' ' 

"  But  you  must  notice,  my  charitable  friend,  that  I 
am  gradually  growing  up  to  my  adjectives,"  insinu 
atingly  said  the  Idiot.  "Another  great  idea  of  mine 
— start  with  big  adjectives  and  try  hard  to  live  up  to 
them.  Before  you  know  it  you're  a  big  man.  See  !  " 

"  That  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  Factory.  Tell 
us  about  it,"  said  Mr.  Brief,  impatiently. 

"  Same  general  line  of  thought,  Mr.  Brief,"  re 
plied  the  Idiot.  "Bangs  is  nothing  if  not  original. 
He  said  to  himself  one  day,  <  Here  are  a  lot  of  fellows 
I  know  travelling  all  over  the  world  for  literary  and 
artistic  experiences — Material  they  call  it.  What's 
the  matter  with  manufacturing  experiences  right  here 
at  home  for  half  the  cost  !  I  believe  in  encouraging 
home  industries.'  So  he  decided  to  blow  in  some 
money  and  run  for  Mayor  of  Yonkers.  That  town 
narrowly  missed  having  a  dandy  Mayor,  but  Bangs 

22 


got  his  money's  worth  of  experience — and  the  result 
was  'Three  Weeks  in  Politics/  one  of  his  most  suc 
cessful  books." 

' '  But  what  about  the  Factory  ? ' '  asked  the  indignant 
boarders  in  chorus,  looking  at  the  dining-room  clock. 

"  I've  just  given  you  the  germinal  idea,"  said  the 
Idiot.  "Says  Bangs  to  me — 'Idiot,  old  boy,  we'll 
go  right  ahead  manufacturing  humorous  experiences 
on  a  large  scale.  I'll  build  a  magnificent  villa  on 
the  banks  of  the  Hudson,  not  far  from  my  home. 
It  shall  be  divided  into  about  fifty  suites  of  comforta 
ble  apartments,  with  good  table-board,  plenty  of  out 
door  sports,  and  everything  to  keep  the  guests  in 
good  humor.  I'll  invite  up  for  long  visits  a  choice 
assortment  of  mothers  -  in  -  law,  bad  boys,  Irish  co 
medians,  Yankee  farmers,  summer  girls,  brakemen, 
bunco-steerers,  and  all  the  other  indispensable  char 
acters  for  American  humor.  Then  I'll  just  come 
over  for  an  hour  or  two  every  day  and  visit  with  them 
— and  my  books  will  write  themselves.  And  you 
shall  have  a  ground-floor  suite,  Mr.  Idiot,  and  manage 
the  whole  show.  Are  you  with  me  ?'  'I'm  yours 
for  life,  Mr.  Bangs,'  said  I.  No  humor  from  this 
Factory  genuine  unless  countersigned  by  me.  Buy 
the  Idiot  Brand  /" 

"  And  so,  Mrs.  Pedagog,"  said  the  Idiot,  turning 
to  the  head  of  the  table,  "  I  give  you  notice  that  I 
must  quit  your  hospitable  board.  But  I'll  invite  you 
all  up  to  stay  awhile  at  the  Factory.  Bangs  needs 
you  in  his  business.  Ta,  ta  !  " 
23 


SOME   REMARKS  OF  MAJOR  BRACE 

APROPOS   OF    "WINDFALLS   OF   OBSERVATION,"    BY  EDWARD   S. 
MARTIN. 

"  I'VE  been  having  a  delightful  afternoon,"  said 
1  Major  Brace,  as  he  slid  into  his  favorite  corner 
of  the  Club  cafe,  and  rang  the  bell.  The  younger 
men  were  dropping  in  from  down-town  with  the  wor- 
riment  of  a  financial  crisis  written  on  their  faces,  but 
the  Major's  serenity  was  perennial  and  contagious. 
They  liked  to  hear  him  talk,  and  this  was  his  favorite 
hour.  As  the  Martini  was  placed  before  him  he  con 
tinued :  "While  you  youngsters  have  been  hustling 
down  town  for  dollars  that  are  not  in  circulation,  I 
have  been  up  in  the  Club  library  reading  Mar 
tin's  book,  'Windfalls  of  Observation.'  There's  a 
wise  youth  for  you  !  He  has  a  good,  workable  phi 
losophy  which  contains  my  three  cardinal  virtues 
for  the  man  of  the  world  —  Courage,  Gumption, 
Serenity." 

"  Come,  now,  Major,"  said  the  Impertinent  Youth. 
"  Everybody  knows  that  you  pat  Martin  on  the  back 
because  he  occasionally  puts  your  harangues  in  print. 
A  little  bit  flattered,  eh  ?  " 
24 


"  There  is  something  in  what  you  say,"  replied 
the  Major,  affably.  "  We  all  have  our  little  vanities. 
But  discounting  the  vanity,  I  want  you  boys  to  read 
the  '  Windfalls. '  I  am  twice  the  age  of  any  one  of 
you,  and  I  know  what  is  good  for  a  man  of  thirty. 
And  I  say  that  it  is  good  for  men  of  your  years  to 
believe  many  of  the  things  that  Martin  talks  about. 
Most  of  you  are  university  and  professional  men. 
You  imagine  that  you  have  lived  a  long  time,  and 
that  you  see  clear  through  to  the  end  of  the  journey. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  you  are  just  fairly  started.  You 
are  all  a  little  cynical ;  it  takes  the  form  of  mistrust 
of  all  men  and  most  women.  When  you  only  knew 
your  own  folks  and  a  limited  circle  of  friends,  you 
imagined  that  the  world  was  filled  with  good,  decent 
people.  But  your  business  and  professions  have 
brought  you  in  violent  contact  with  the  other  kind, 
and  now  you  go  to  the  other  extreme  and  believe 
that  most  men  are  rogues.  Oh,  the  cruelty  of  the 
wisdom  of  youth  ! 

"  But  what  I  like  in  these  essays  of  Martin's  is  the 
fine  charity  which  seasons  the  wisdom  of  youth.  He 
looks  on  the  world  with  the  keen  eyes  of  a  young 
man,  but  tempers  his  judgments  with  that  equipoise 
and  good -will  which  we  are  accustomed  to  associate 
with  a  lovable  old  age.  That  is  why  I  am  commend 
ing  his  philosophy  to  you.  The  sooner  you  put  your 
self  in  that  attitude,  the  sooner  will  you  grasp  the 
secret  of  the  perpetual  youth  of  the  heart.  When  you 
begin  to  look  for  the  finer,  honest  side  in  the  men  and 
25 


women  you  meet,  you  yourself  become  the  touch 
stone  that  reveals  it  in  them.  You  find  your  way  in 
life  cheered  with  this  atmosphere  of  good-will,  which 
you  in  part  create  yourself,  and  partly  reveal  in  others. 

"  I  know  I  am  preaching  a  little,"  said  the  Major, 
as  he  noticed  signs  of  uneasiness  among  the  boys. 
"  But  that  is  one  of  the  privileges  of  my  years.  Be 
sides  you  owe  me  something  for  listening  to  your  long 
debates  on  legal  and  commercial  questions,  that  are  of 
no  earthly  account  to  anybody  but  money-grubbers. 
I  am  in  dead  earnest  about  this,  because  I  like  the 
enthusiasms  of  youth  and  hate  its  cynicisms;  and 
when  I  find  a  young  man  writing  sweet-tempered, 
acute,  serene,  and  manly  essays  like  these,  I  want 
other  young  men  to  read  them.  They  are  so  utterly 
without  pretence  or  affectation  of  knowledge,  and  the 
humor  ripples  through  the  pages  like  a  clear  brook  in 
a  meadow. 

"  You  must  not  think  from  what  I  have  been  say 
ing  that  he  has  no  eye  for  human  frailties.  Why,  the 
satire  pricks  something  at  every  turn,  like  briers  along 
the  brook  !  But  it  is  the  peaceful  dwelling  together  in 
these  pages  of  satire  and  good  feeling,  humor  and  good 
manners,  that  makes  the  charm  of  the  book  for  me. 

"  Now,  you  must  not  tell  Martin  what  I  have  been 
saying.  He'll  think  I  want  him  to  publish  some 
more  of  my  Views.  I  don't.  Waiter,  take  the  or 
ders  !  " 


26 


ARCADIAN    LETTERS 


TO  TERENCE   MULVANEY 

APROPOS   OF   "  MANY   INVENTIONS,"    BY   RUDYARD   KIPLING. 

RH,  Terence,  my  boy,  Mr.  Kipling  has  been  tell 
ing  us  some  more  of  your  stories,  and  they  are 
making  glad  the  hearts  of  your  old  friends.  We  had 
heard  that  you  were  out  of  the  army,  and  boss  of  a 
gang  of  coolies  on  a  railway  in  Central  India — 
"Ker'nel  on  the  railway  line,  an'  a  consequinshal 
man,"  as  you  graphically  put  it;  and  we  feared  your 
new  job  would  put  an  end  to  your  tales.  But  here 
you  are  again  in  finer  form  than  ever !  For  myself, 
I  don't  think  you  ever  span  a  better  yarn  than  "  My 
Lord,  the  Elephant  " — though  there  are  impertinent 
fellows  who  assert  that  you  have  often  come  nearer 
the  truth.  They  don't  know  you,  my  boy,  and  I 
want  to  say  that  I  have  no  more  doubt  that  you  rode 
the  must  elephant  around  the  barracks  at  Cawnpore, 
than  I  have  that  Dinah  Shadd  is  the  best  wife  that 
ever  fell  to  the  lot  of  one  of  the  Queen's  soldiers. 
And  that  other  tale  of  yours  about  the  man  you  nick 
named  "  Love-o'- Women  " — I  wonder  if  you  know 
that  it  is  what  literary  men  call  "a  pathetic  trag 
edy?"  No,  you  don't,  Terence,  and  I  hope  you 
29 


never  may — for  when  you  begin  to  look  on  your 
stories  in  that  fashion  they'll  cease  to  be  worth  telling. 
What  people  like  about  you  over  on  this  side  of  the 
earth  is  that  you,  3&&Jock  and  Ortheris  as  well,  are 
brave  men  who  take  hold  of  the  things  nearest  you 
without  much  bellowing ;  and  you  never  whine  when 
you  are  hurt.  As  Ortheris  puts  it,  "I  ain't  a  recruity 
to  go  whinin'  about  my  rights  to  this  an'  my  rights 
to  that,  as  if  I  couldn't  look  after  myself.  My  rights  ! 
'Streweth  A' mighty  !  I'm  a  man  !  " 

I  don't  mind  telling  you,  confidentially,  that  we 
need  some  tales  like  yours  and  Mr.  Kipling's  over 
here.  We  have  a  good  many  fine  young  men  writing 
stories,  but  they  spend  most  of  their  time  putting 
frills  on  them.  As  Stanley  would  say,  there  are  "a 
lot  o'  bloomin'  petticoats"  in  their  stories,  and  they 
sit  around  on  "  piazzas  "  and  talk  to  young  men  who 
are  about  as  useless  as  a  subaltern  just  out  from  Eng 
land.  Nobody  ever  does  anything;  they  simply 
think  great  big  thoughts  that  congest  in  their  bloom - 
in'  heads. 

You  are  away  off  in  India,  and  might  think  from 
this  that  we  are  a  rum  lot — but  we  are  not.  We  have 
plenty  of  men  who  can  do  things  without  making  a 
fuss — fight  great  battles,  build  immense  railroads,  in 
vent  wonderful  machines,  or  put  a  World's  Fair  to 
gether  in  two  years  that  beat  all  records.  Mr.  Kip 
ling  does  not  like  us  because  we  are  too  sensitive 
about  many  other  things  that  we  can't  do  ;  and  that's 
true,  too.  But  then,  you  know,  we  should  not  get 
3° 


ahead  if  we  were  not  a  little  sensitive.  You  don't 
know  where  to  stretch  a  shoe  until  it  pinches  you. 

But  it  does  not  matter  what  Mr.  Kipling  thinks  of 
us ;  we  know  a  good  story  when  we  see  it,  and  we 
shall  go  right  along  reading  his  and  yours,  and  asking 
for  more,  and  waiting  for  that  Great  Novel  which  you 
and  I  know  he  is  man  enough  to  write  some  day. 

With  my  regards  to  Dinah  Shadd, 


TO   EVADNE   GALBRAITH 

APROPOS   OF    "THE   HEAVENLY   TWINS,"    BY   MADAM   SARAH 
GRAND. 

DEAR  MADAM  :  As  the  heroine  of  a  book  about 
which  England  has  been  talking,  you  have,  no 
doubt,  by  this  time  gauged  English  opinion  in  regard 
to  your  advanced  views  about  the  rights  of  women. 
But  the  American  view  must  be  rather  vague  to  you 
by  reason  of  your  aloofness  from  our  sympathies  in 
such  questions.  I  know  that,  with  your  strong  wish 
to  look  on  Truth  squarely,  you  will  pardon  a  very  ex 
plicit  statement  of  the  causes  which  have  operated  to 
keep  American  women  out  of  accord  with  your  views 
as  interpreted  by  Madam  Grand  in  "The  Heavenly 
Twins. ' '  I  think  that  your  friend  Mrs.  Malcomson 
expressed  very  tersely  this  feeling  of  "difference" 
when  she  said,  with  some  indignation  :  "  Oh,  yes,  we 
have  our  reward,  we  Englishwomen.  We  religiously 
obey  our  men.  We  do  nothing  of  which  they  disap 
prove.  We  are  the  meekest  sheep  in  the  world.  We 
scorn  your  independent,  outspoken  American  women  ; 
we  think  them  bold  and  unwomanly,  and  do  all  we  can 
to  be  as  unlike  them  as  possible.  And  what  happens  ? 
32 


Do  our  men  adore  us?  Well,  they  continue  to  say 
so.  But  it  is  the  Americans  they  marry. ' ' 

If  you  will  pardon  a  blunt  statement  of  it,  I  think 
you  will  find  that  it  is  this  very  "  difference  "  which 
will  incline  the  American  girl  to  be  amused  at  your 
warmth  about  certain  rights  for  women,  rather  than 
be  stirred  up  to  join  you  in  a  crusade  for  them.  She 
will  toss  her  pretty  head  and  say,  with  accustomed 
frankness  : 

"  Bless  you,  dear  Madam,  why  should  we  organize 
to  make  a  fight  for  these  rights,  when  we  have  them 
already  without  the  asking  !  Of  course  American 
girls  do  marry  the  kind  of  wicked  men  whom  you 
preach  against — and  very  often  they  are  Englishmen. 
But  then,  you  know,  we  don't  do  it  from  ignorance 
or  because  we  have  been  educated  in  a  corral.  Dear 
no  !  We  either  find  the  men  interesting,  or  they 
have  a  title  or  some  position  that  we  want  to  share 
with  them.  Our  eyes  are  open,  and  we  know  what 
we  want,  and  generally  get  it.  Sometimes  we  find 
that  we  have  made  a  bad  bargain.  Of  course,  that  is 
a  part  of  the  risk  of  the  game.  But  if  we  do,  we 
follow  the  example  of  our  American  fathers  when  they 
have  been  caught  by  a  bad  bargain — we  speculate  in 
futures  in  the  hope  of  making  things  come  out  even. 
Few  American  girls  stake  all  their  life  on  love  and 
marriage ;  we  can  play  the  game  for  so  many  other 
stakes.  There  is  social  position  for  one  ;  reputation 
as  an  intellectual  woman  for  another  (dear  me,  how 
easily  we  can  make  the  men  believe  that  we  are 
33 


learned) ;  then  there  are  the  Church  and  organized 
charity  which  give  us  abundant  outlets  for  our  execu 
tive  energies.  For  you  must  realize  that  we  are  ex 
ecutive  above  all  things.  That  is  why  we  are  ceasing 
to  be  morbid.  And,  my  dear  lady,  I  fear  you  are 
very  morbid.  You  yourself  have  said  that  thought 
which  does  not  lead  to  action  makes  one  morbid,  and 
that  has  been  your  trouble.  If  you  had  simply  spent 
two  or  three  months  organizing  your  crusade,  you 
would  have  forgotten  all  your  trouble.  It  would  not 
matter  whether  you  accomplished  anything  or  not ; 
the  cure  is  in  the  very  act  of  organization.  Why,  we 
have  doctors  who  will  tell  you  on  the  sly  that  they 
have  encouraged  the  organizing  mania  among  women 
as  a  cure  for  nervous  prostration.  I  know  of  one  par 
ticularly  bad  case  where  the  physician  hinted  to  the 
patient  that  there  was  a  crying  need  for  a  society  to 
provide  East-Side  waifs  with  tops  in  season.  It  was 
harmless,  and  it  cured  her.  (That  is  the  beauty  of 
our  men  by  the  way,  they  let  us  do  as  we  please,  and 
yet  manage  us.)" 

The  American  girl,  with  her  usual  audacity,  has 
filled  most  of  my  letter.  But  I  want  to  say  a  word 
for  the  American  man  in  contrast  to  the  men  in  your 
story.  Your  men  don't  seem  to  have  enough  to  do 
— that  is  why,  perhaps,  they  spend  so  much  time 
deceiving  women.  (I  am  referring  to  your  men  as 
you  see  them,  and  not  as  I  believe  they  are.)  Now 
the  American  man  is  a  busy  creature.  If  he  does  not 
have  to  work  for  a  living,  he  is  apt  to  create  some  en- 
34 


grossing  work  for  his  mere  good  pleasure.  After  all 
that  has  been  said  about  it,  we  really  have  very  few 
idle  rich  men  here  ;  there  are  a  great  many  more  idle 
''little  brothers  of  the  rich" — a  class  of  parasites 
who  would  be  idle  in  any  condition  of  life.  When 
our  men  arc  busy,  they  are  in  it  heart  and  soul  for 
success,  and  that  leaves  little  time  for  what  is  vicious. 
The  spare  time  the  American  man  has  is  occupied  by 
some  bright  girl,  who  probably  "  knows  the  world  " 
as  well  as  he  does  and  often  "gives  him  points." 
You  must  not  think  them  "  bold  and  unwomanly," 
as  your  friend  says.  They  simply  look  at  things 
with  clear  eyes,  and  with  a  heart  filled  with  that  good 
will  for  men  and  women  that  "  thinketh  no  evil  " — 
but,  nevertheless,  sees  it  if  it  exists. 

That,  I  take  it,  is  all  that  you  would  ask  or  seek 
by  your  crusade.  Just  cross  the  ocean  and  find  it ! 

Kindly  express  my  thanks  to  Diavolo  and  Angelica , 
the  heavenly  twins,  for  the  rich  amusement  their 
amazing  personal  cleverness  has  afforded  us. 


35 


TO  DIANA  OF  THE  CROSSWAYS,  SURREY 

APROPOS    OF    "  LOVE-LETTERS    OF   A    WORLDLY   WOMAN,"    BY 
MRS.   W.  K.  CLIFFORD. 

DEAR  DIANA :  You  are  always  a  graceful  woman, 
in  important  and  in  trivial  things,  and  in  noth 
ing  are  you  so  often  tactful  as  in  your  little  remem 
brances  for  days  and  seasons.  You  write  me  that  the 
hedges  and  the  Downs  in  Surrey  are  full  of  the  per 
fume  of  Spring,  and  you  feel  sure  that  I  shall  be  wan 
dering  into  the  country  very  soon  to  breathe  the  odor 
of  apple-blossoms.  So  you  send  me  the  "Love- 
Letters  of  a  Worldly  Woman,"  which  will  be  just  the 
little  book  I  want  to  read  on  the  way  down  to  the 
country,  in  the  cars,  and  think  about  on  the  way 
back.  "You  will  go  a-looking  for  your  lost  youth 
in  the  springtime,  and  this  little  book  will  show  you 
how  far  away  it  is,"  you  add  with  a  touch  of  irony. 

The  letter  and  the  book  came  as  I  was  starting  for 
Arcady  and  the  old  college,  and  I  have  read  it  while 
skimming  along  green  fields,  or  sitting  under  the 
elms.  It  has  brought  back  the  old  mood,  as  you 
knew  it  would,  and  I  am  not  sure  as  I  sit  here  whether 
it  was  yesterday  or  a  hundred  years  ago,  that  I  left 
these  gray  old  cloisters  and  closed  the  doors  on  this 
36 


world  of  sentiment  and  aspiration.  For  it  is  to  this 
world  that  these  letters  belong. 

The  title,  as  you  must  have  felt,  is  a  misnomer — 
for  none  of  these  are  the  letters  of  a  "worldly 
woman."  In  the  three  parts  of  the  book  it  is  essen 
tially  the  same  woman  who  writes — at  different  ages 
and  degrees  of  experience.  But  she  is  always  the 
woman  of  sentiment,  romance,  and  aspiration — the 
sort  of  woman  whom  the  group  of  "  digs  "  in  cap  and 
gown,  who  are  discussing  the  "eternal  verities"  in 
the  next  room,  would  worship,  and  then  write  perfect 
ly  correct  hexameters  in  her  honor.  They  would  be 
lieve  that  her  little  affectations  of  cynicism  were  real 
worldly  wisdom,  and  stand  a  little  bit  in  awe  of  them. 
But  you,  Diana,  who  knew  the  real  world  and  suffered 
in  it  before  you  married  dear  old  Redworth,  would 
never  be  deceived  by  these  assertions  of  womanly 
independence. 

I  know  what  you  think  about  her  and  I  can  almost 
hear  you  say  it :  "  This  woman  is  lovable,  but  she 
would  be  very  uncomfortable  .in  a  family;  I  know, 
for  I  was  once  like  her ;  and  if  I  had  married  Tom  in 
those  days  I  should  have  ruined  his  career,  simply  by 
continually  urging  him  to  make  what  I  called  '  sacri 
fices  '  for  success.  That  dear  man  is  now  a  type  of 
the  right  kind  of  success,  but  there  is  none  of  that 
sort  of  heroism  in  it  which  the  woman  who  writes 
these  letters  worships  in  a  man." 

What  you  and  I  really  like  about  her  is  a  certain 
fervor  and  intensity  of  love  which  she  lavishes  on  her 
37 


ideal  man.  You  know  there  never  was  such  a  man 
(except  Tom  Red  worth),  but  if  she  should  find  him 
some  day  she  would  be  sorry  that  she  ever  married 
Sir  Noel,  even  though  he  should  be  Prime  Minister. 
It  is  the  possibility  that  a  woman  may  cherish  such  a 
delusion  about  him  that  makes  a  man  love  her.  If  he 
can  only  be  the  hook  on  which  she  hangs  her  ideal 
man,  he  is  content.  So  long  as  she  does  not  distin 
guish  between  the  hook  and  the  ideal,  the  real  man  is 
happy ;  but  when  she  attempts  to  differentiate  them 
his  trouble  begins.  That  is  why  you  and  I  think  that 
the  woman  of  these  clever  stories  is  lovable,  but  un 
comfortable. 

What  I  most  like  about  her  is  that  she  clearly  dis 
tinguishes  between  what  is  really  interesting  and  what 
is  simply  conventional,  what  is  respectable  and  what 
is  important.  That  is  a  line  which  few  women  draw, 
and  not  a  host  of  men.  I  am  inclined  to  think  that 
it  is  as  important  as  the  "  moral  law  " — perhaps  it  is 
the  moral  law  in  a  nutshell. 

But  it  is  growing  very  late ;  the  college  clock  is 
striking,  and  there  is  a  rumpus  outside  the  door.  It 
is  the  boy  (who  calls  me  "  Uncle  "  when  he  wants  to 
tease,  and  "  Jack  "  when  he  wants  what  he  is  pleased 
to  call  a  loaii)  who  enters  with  his  comrades.  "  It  is 
almost  time  for  the  Owl  train  back  to  the  city,  old 
man,"  he  says,  "and  I  am  sorry  you  can't  stay  for 
our  spread. ' '  The  boys  all  carry  mysterious  packages, 
and  I  have  a  suspicion  that  there  is  little  left  of  the 
"  loan  "  the  boy  negotiated  a  few  hours  ago. 
33 


It  is  a  cheap  price  for  a  happy  day  and  an  evening 
of  pleasant  reverie  in  the  very  room  that  was  once 
mine ;  nothing  left  of  the  original  shell  but  this  old 
table  which  the  boy  says  "must  have  come  out  of  the 
Ark."  At  any  rate  I  know  that  Noah  was  young 
when  he  bought  it,  and  he  wrote  reams  of  letters  on 
it  to  a  woman  who  before  the  flood  was  called  Diana 
Antonia  Merion. 

THE  CLOISTERS,  COLLEGE  OF  ARCADY. 


39 


TO  ONE  WHO  IS  TIRED  OF  READING 

DEAR  BOY :  You  write  me  from  your  lovely 
Southern  island  that  you  are  sitting  in  the  sun. 
and  looking  down  a  long  avenue  of  live-oaks,  fes 
tooned  with  hanging  moss  and  mistletoe.  From 
your  piazza  you  can  see  the  deer  dart  across  the  open 
space,  and  hear  the  whir  of  partridge  wings  when 
they  are  startled.  Over  all  the  animated  stillness 
lingers  the  low  music  of  the  summer  ocean.  And 
yet  you  are  discontented  because  your  books  have 
lost  their  charm,  and  even  dear  old  Horatius  Flac- 
cus,  who  is  your  solace  and  your  cheer,  has  ceased  to 
charm  you.  And  you  expect  me  (shivering  by  a 
radiator,  and  listening  to  the  sleet  biting  at  the  win 
dow  glass)  to  sympathize  with  you  !  For  long  years 
we  have  been  friends  together,  but  my  friendship 
does  not  reach  that  far. 

I  could  never  understand  why  a  man  of  your  years 
and  philosophy  should  make  your  appetite  for  read 
ing  a  test  of  your  general  health.  I  suspect  that  it 
is  because  you  have  been  always  a  successful  man  of 
affairs,  and  books  have  been  your  recreation.  When 
you  don't  enjoy  your  recreation  you  rightly  infer  that 
40 


your  vitality  is  running  a  little  low.  It  would  be 
equally  true  of  horseback  riding,  or  whist  playing  if 
they  chanced  to  be  your  favorite  amusements — and 
yet  who  would  let  his  conscience  worry  him  about 
loss  of  enjoyment  in  them  ! 

You  have  the  appreciative  amateur's  over-esteem 
for  books  and  book-making.  I  have  never  heard  you 
express  any  admiration  for  the  work  of  great  iron 
and  steel  contractors ;  that  happens  to  be  your  occu 
pation,  and  you  know  how  it  is  done,  and  what  suc 
cess  in  it  costs.  I  have  seen  you  come  home  after 
an  all-day  wrestle  with  giants  in  the  railway  world, 
whom  you  have  brought  'round  to  your  way  of 
thinking  at  a  directors'  meeting.  It  cost  you  blood 
and  brains,  and  yet  you  showed  no  elation,  no  sense 
of  victory ;  you  simply  poked  sarcasm  at  the  whole 
lot  of  them,  whom  you  had  barely  beaten,  and,  most 
of  all,  at  yourself  for  expending  so  much  energy  on 
the  affair. 

Then  you  would  have  your  dinner,  and  your  pipe, 
and  the  newest  book  perhaps,  or  a  very  old  one.  At 
intervals  you  would  break  out  into  explosions  of  ad 
miration  for  some  deftly  turned  phrase,  or  rhythmic 
line  which  a  youngster  somewhere  on  this  or  the 
other  side  of  the  sea  had  reeled  off  because  he  had 
spent  most  of  his  life  in  an  easy-chair  and  liked  to 
fool  with  pen  and  paper  and  his  own  emotions. 

If  you  had  ever  come  nearer  to  it  than  the  printed 
page,  you  would  have  a  clear  idea  of  what  "  an  old 
woman's  work"  this  writing  business  often  is.  It 


would  be  a  rare  sight  to  see  a  great,  strong,  alert 
giant  like  you  pinned  down  to  a  desk,  playing  with 
words  as  though  they  were  blocks  in  a  puzzle.  I  can 
imagine  you,  after  an  hour  or  two  of  it,  rising  in  your 
wrath  and  turning  the  whole  business  over  to  your 
type-writer,  as  suited  better  to  her  placid,  mechanical 
way  of  life. 

11  Give  me  men,"  you  would  cry,  "  to  move  my 
way,  and  carry  out  my  ideas  !  Let  me  deal  with 
real  forces  and  great  masses  of  material  things  that 
may  be  builded  into  realizations  of  my  wildest 
dreams  !  I  want  to  live,  while  I  live,  down  to  my 
finger-tips.  This  playing  with  a  dictionary  isn't  liv 
ing." 

And  yet  you  are  sitting  there  in  the  balmy  South 
growling  because  you  now  prefer  to  look  down  the 
avenue  of  live-oaks  rather  than  read  a  book  !  You 
don't  realize  how  perfectly  sane  and  healthy  you 
now  are,  and  that  you  don't  want  to  read  because 
your  tired  nerves  are  adjusting  themselves  to  a  nor 
mal  way  of  life,  and  to  the  gentle  healing  of  Nature. 
Don't  come  to  me  for  sympathy  ;  but  go  out  and 
kill  a  deer. 


42 


TO   JEAN  AT  TWENTY-TWO 

nFTER  long  silence,  dear  Jean,  you  write  to  your 
"venerable  friend,"  and  ask  whether  among 
your  New- Year  resolves  you  shall  include  a  prohibi 
tion  of  all  fiction.  "  At  twenty-two,"  you  say,  "  I 
begin  to  see  that  I  have  been  living  in  a  Fool's  Para 
dise,  and  I  am  not  quite  sure  that  I  have  not  built 
the  greater  part  of  it  with  novels.  If  my  mental  fur 
niture  is  only  a  useless  lot  of  illusions,  I  want  to  get 
rid  of  it  as  soon  as  possible.  If  novels  are  only  fairy 
tales  for  grown-up  boys  and  girls,  why  should  a  sen 
sible  woman  waste  time  over  them?  You  have  lived 
thirty  years  longer  than  I,  and  your  friends  call  you 
happy.  Come,  be  frank  with  me  !  " 

I  can  remember  very  well,  Jean,  when  I  felt  just  as 
old,  restless,  and  unsatisfied  as  you  do  now,  and  it 
was  about  thirty  years  ago.  Since  then  I  think  I 
have  grown  a  little  younger  every  year,  until  I  have 
become  a  gray-haired  and  rotund  youth,  with  a  fond 
ness  for  chimney-corners  and  long  pipes  and  after- 
dinner  naps — and  novels.  I'll  confess  this  early,  so 
that  you  may  realize  what  a  mistake  you  make  in 
asking  my  advice. 

43 


People  of  a  certain  age  know  that  until  a  boy  gets 
well  into  the  twenties  the  most  interesting  thing  in  the 
world  to  him  is  himself.  If  he  falls  in  love  during 
that  period,  it  is- only  a  kind  of  huge  fete  to  his  own 
vanity.  He  reads  fiction  to  find  in  it  the  reflection 
and  glorification  of  his  own  qualities.  But  before 
twenty-five  he  wakens  to  a  knowledge  of  his  Fool's 
Paradise.  Then  ensues  a  most  unhappy  period,  when 
he  is  deeply  disgusted  with  himself  and  everybody 
else — for,  conscious  of  his  own  absurdity,  as  a  last  sop 
to  his  egotism,  he  persuades  himself  that  all  the  world 
is  equally  foolish.  That  is  the  period  of  pessimism, 
doubt,  heroic  resolve,  and  small  accomplishment. 

But  one  day,  ever  to  be  remembered,  a  little  rift 
appears  in  the  clouds,  and  he  sees  how  fair  a  world 
the  sun  is  shining  upon,  and  how  interesting  are  the 
people  in  it.  Before  he  knows  it,  he  is  absorbed  in 
watching  the  glorious  and  pathetic  pageant  of  life,  and 
sings  with  a  modern  poet : 

"  Easier  may  I  tolerate 
My  neighbor  than  myself  not  hate." 

The  more  absorbed  he  becomes  in  others  the  less 
he  thinks  of  himself;  he  has  discovered  the  fountain 
of  contentment,  and  drunk  of  the  waters  of  perpetual 
youth.  This  is  his  last  illusion.  Men  have  wrapped 
themselves  in  it,  and  at  the  end  of  fourscore  years  have 
lain  down  to  rest  in  it,  with  their  hearts  full  of  gentle 
thoughts  and  a  great  hope,  and  their  memory  glad 
dened  with  good  deeds. 

44 


You  are  laughing,  no  doubt,  at  my  sermon,  but  it 
is  the  privilege  of  elderly  men  to  preach.  "Yes," 
you  say,  "  but  what  has  it  all  to  do  with  my  question 
about  novels?  "  Well,  I  confess  that  I  like  to  come 
around  to  a  text  by  way  of  a  lot  of  platitudes,  espe 
cially  when  I  have  a  listener  so  patient  and  so  fair  as 
you.  Do  you  not  see  that,  if  life  is  the  most  engag 
ing  study  and  the  chiefest  consolation  for  the  living, 
the  best  novels,  which  are  the  work  of  men  pro 
foundly  interested  in  life,  are  a  force  that  makes  for 
happiness  ? 

Your  opportunities  and  mine  for  seeing  much  of 
this  fascinating  show  may  be  sadly  limited  by  health 
or  circumstance  ;  perhaps  we  have  such  a  part  to  play 
in  the  ranks  that  we  march  wearily  along  in  a  tread 
mill  way,  and  only  see  the  faces  in  our  own  battalion. 
But,  in  the  little  halts  for  rest  by  the  way,  around  the 
camp-fire,  tired  though  we  be,  we  may  read  the  re 
ports  of  our  more  fortunate  comrades  who  have  had  a 
place  on  the  reviewing-stand.  How  it  kindles  our 
imagination  and  warms  the  cockles  of  our  hearts  to 
feel  that  we  are  a  part  of  the  great  and  onward-mov 
ing  pageant  !  We  have  more  respect  for  the  men 
next  to  us  in  the  ranks  after  this  outlook  on  the  larger 
life. 

So  it  has  happened  that  the  great  novelists  were 
men  of  broad  sympathy  and  tolerance,  because  they 
were  ennobled  by  what  their  faculty  of  perception  re 
vealed  to  them. 


45 


TO  A   CERTAIN  CRITIC 

DEAR  DROCH:  For  ten  years  you  have  been 
talking  at  people  about  books,  and  nobody  ever 
has  a  chance  to  talk  back.  I  don't  think  it  is  quite 
fair,  and  that  is  why  I  am  writing  this  letter.  It  will 
free  my  mind,  though  I  don't  believe  you  will  be 
square  enough  to  print  it. 

You  must  be  a  rather  old  man  by  this  time,  for  you 
have  so  little  comprehension  of  the  tastes  of  youth. 
You  seem  to  think  that  we  take  our  reading  seriously ; 
that  we  want  to  think  about  a  book  after  we  have 
closed  its  covers ;  that  we  are  wildly  anxious  to  get 
at  its  merits  of  construction,  style,  and  even  moral 
ity.  Bless  your  gray  hairs,  how  did  you  get  the  idea 
that  the  modern  youth  takes  anything  seriously,  least 
of  all  his  reading?  We  have  too  many  amusing 
things  to  occupy  our  time  to  dwell  on  any  one  of 
them  long  enough  for  what  our  fathers  used  to  call 
"  reflection."  Don't  you  honestly  believe  that  what 
they  thought  was  "reflection  "  was  simply  the  ordi 
nary  kind  of  "mooning"  which  afflicts  lazy  people? 
What  good  ever  came  of  it?  So  far  as  I  can  dis 
cover  it  led  to  absurdly  sensitive  consciences  which 
46 


made  them  all  miserable.  Then  began  the  habit  of 
"  exacting  "  all  kinds  of  duties  from  themselves,  and 
their  neighbors.  The  wisest  of  them  began  on  their 
neighbors  and  spent  the  little  time  left  on  themselves. 
When  they  ran  out  of  live  material  for  dissection,  they 
fell  back  on  ' '  discussing  books  ' '  —  and  I  fancy  it 
was  in  your  manner. 

I  am  glad  I  did  not  live  in  those  days.  Aren't 
you  just  a  little  sorry  for  yourself  sometimes  ? 

But  I  want  to  tell  you  frankly  what  a  book  and 
reading  really  mean  to  the  modern  youth. 

We  are  told  on  the  highest  scientific  authority  that 
we  are  "very  highly  developed  organisms."  We 
are  complicated  and  delicately  adjusted  machines. 
These  machines,  under  modern  conditions,  are  run 
on  a  fuel  which  we  call  "excitement."  You  know 
what  a  rattle  and  jarring  takes  place  in  a  big  thresh 
ing-machine  when  they  stop  feeding  it  sheaves  of 
grain  ?  The  wise  farmer  always  runs  a  little  straw 
through  while  the  machine  is  slowing  down  to  save 
the  wear  and  tear. 

Well,  we  read  books  on  the  same  principle  exactly. 
They  are  the  straw  that  slows  down  the  machine 
easily  when  active  pleasure  and  excitement  are  not 
at  hand.  Chaff  is  just  as  good  as  wheat-in-the-sheaf 
for  that  purpose. 

There  is  another  way  of  looking  at  it.     You  know 

that   modern  science  has  robbed  us  of  our  illusions 

— from    babyhood   up   to   maturity.      If  you  never 

brought  yourself  up  without  illusions  you  can't  imag- 

47 


ine  how  dreary  it  sometimes  is.  I  did  not  mean  to 
tell  you  about  this — but  sometimes  the  cold,  gray 
light  in  which  we  see  everything  is  simply  heart 
breaking.  Perhaps  it  is  only  the  nervous  reaction 
when  the  machine  is  slowing  down.  It  is  not  so 
many  years  ago  that  I  went  to  sleep  crying  because 
all  my  dolls  were  so  painfully  like  real  people.  It 
was  about  that  time  that  I  first  found  out  that  a  book 
was  a  very  good  substitute  for  lost  illusions,  and  I 
have  been  taking  the  medicine  ever  since.  And  you 
critics  try  your  best  to  rob  us  of  that  last  refuge  for 
our  illusions,  by  picking  it  to  pieces.  Don't,  please 
don't !  Yours  Reproachfully, 

JEAN. 


48 


TO  A  FRIEND  STARTING  ON  A  VACATION 

MY  DEAR  JACK :  You  write  that  you  have  the 
prospect  of  closing  your  desk  in  the  office  of  the 
Daily  Whirl  for  a  month,  of  sweeping  the  scraps 
and  shreds  of  Associated  Press  despatches  into  your 
basket,  of  writing  one  more  "display  head"  on  a 
"  Terrible  Loss  of  Life  "—and  then  for  the  Wilder 
ness.  For  weeks  you  have  dreamed  of  a  bed  of  spruce 
boughs,  of  a  bark  camp  with  a  leaping  fire  on  the  side 
that  is  open  toward  the  lake — and  now  you  are  ready 
to  make  it  all  something  better  than  "  a  vision  of  the 
night."  You  recall  that  I  once  went  into  camp  on 
Cedar  Island,  and  you  would  like  to  know  more 
about  the  place. 

My  dear  fellow,  I  envy  you  the  prospect  of  these 
weeks  in  the  Adirondacks,  and,  if  I  can  help  you  to 
find  the  road  to  the  Mysterious  Island,  I  shall  surely 
add  to  your  happiness. 

I  shall  let  you  find  your  way  to  Utica  and  Boon- 
ville  by  prosaic  steam-cars  and  time-tables. 

While  you  are  waiting  for  dinner  at  Moose  River 
you  will  hear  strange  tales  of  the  horrors  of  the  Old 
Forge  road,  in  the  days  before  the  railroad.  Noth- 
49 


ing  that  an  Adirondack  guide  can  invent  will  quite 
equal  the  roughness  of  that  road.     After  five  years  it  is 
as  vividly  before  me  as  a  memory  of  yesterday.     Yet 
for  out-and-out  amusement  the  "railroad"  beats  it. 
You  cross  a  bridge  at  Moose  River,  and  on  the  banks 
of  the  stream  are  the  "terminal  facilities" — a  shed 
containing  the   entire   rolling-stock   of  the  road — a 
Tom  Thumb  engine,  a  short  platform  car   (for   pas 
sengers)  with  a  zinc  roof  supported  by  iron  pipes,  and 
another  truck  for  freight  and  baggage.*    After  several 
false  starts,  which  are  made  without  sufficient  head 
way  for  the  first  grade,  you  are  off  on  the  strangest 
piece  of  railway  construction  you  have  ever  seen.     A 
pathway  has  been  cut  through  the  densest  forest,  and 
the  trees  on  each  side  are  so  tall  and  straight  that  you 
seem  to  be  at  the  bottom  of  a  green  canyon.     The 
road-bed   is   partly  graded  with   logs  piled  up   in 
squares  like  a  corn-cob  house.     The  rails  are  wood 
en  scantling,  about  three  by  four  inches,  laid  upon 
parallel  unhewn  logs.     Like  two  huge  brown  snakes 
they  creep  through  the  forest,   following  the  sinu 
osities  of  the  land,  and  all  its  little  hills  and  valleys, 
so  that  the  journey  is  like  a  series  of  toboggan  slides. 
You  stop  in  the  heart  of  the  forest,  and  are  invited  by 
the  genial  old  boy  (who  is  conductor,  engineer,  and 
fireman,   all   in   one)   to   help    carry  wood    for  the 
engine.     You  slide  and  roll  over  another  hill  or  two, 
and  then  stop  at  a  trout-brook  while  the  engine  takes 
up  water   through  a  huge  proboscis.       By  and  by, 
*  Written  before  the  present  trunk  line  was  built. 
50 


* 


after  two  hours  of  adventure,  during  which  you  have 
penetrated  nine  miles  of  wilderness,  you  come  upon  a 
winding  stream,  known  as  the  North  Branch. 

There  is  awaiting  you  a  boat  which  is  as  strange  a 
craft  as  any  that  ever  steamed  away  to  a  Mysterious 
Island — flat  bottom,  square  ends,  rounded  corners,  a 
deck  around  the  smoke-stack,  side-wheels  driven  by 
levers  like  grasshopper  legs,  and  a  fireman  whose  chief 
duty  it  is  to  shove  the  boat  around  the  ox-bows  with 
a  pole. 

And  what  a  voyage  you  have  up  the  North  Branch 
in  the  late  afternoon  !  You  are  ascending  another 
canyon  of  green;  alders  fringe  the  banks  of  the 
stream  and  dip  into  it,  while  above  them  rise  walls  of 
spruce  and  balsam  and  hemlock  and  birch  —  tier 
upon  tier  of  variegated  green.  The  river  turns  on 
itself  like  a  chain  of  S's,  sometimes  almost  making  a 
figure  8.  You  reach  the  end  of  the  journey  up  the 
enchanted  stream  about  supper-time,  and  are  driven 
in  a  carryall  to  the  Forge  House.  From  its  piazza 
you  get  a  view  of  the  first  of  the  series  of  lakes  and 
ponds  known  as  the  Fulton  Chain,  and  right  at  your 
feet  you  see  a  graceful  little  steamer  waiting  to  carry 
you  to  the  island. 

In  the  early  twilight  Captain  Jack  takes  his  place 
at  the  bow — tall  and  straight,  clear  blue  eyes,  curly 
iron-gray  hair,  a  trim  uniform — altogether  the  hand 
somest  man  on  the  Chain,  as  he  surely  has  been  one 
of  the  best  guides  for  many  years.  He  stands  at  the 
wheel,  with  curious  little  mail-pouches  all  around  him. 


The  steamer  zigzags  from  camp  to  camp,  and  at 
every  wharf  there  are  men  and  women  with  greet 
ings  and  chaff  for  Jack.  You  seem  to  steam  up  the 
lakes  between  cross-fires  of  laughter — and  now  the 
spirit  of  the  woods  is  upon  you,  and  you  feel  that  here 
is  freedom,  rest,  and  good-will. 

It  is  dark  now,  and  the  camp-fires  are  twinkling  all 
along  the  shores.  In  the  tortuous  inlets  between  the 
lakes  you  have  plucked  water-lilies,  and  raised  your 
eyes  to  find  yourself  suddenly  out  of  the  darkness  on 
a  broad  sheet  of  water  that  mirrors  every  star.  You 
glide  among  the  stars,  on  and  on  in  the  keen  night- 
air,  until  in  the  very  midst  of  the  lake  you  see  a  black 
mound  with  lights  flitting  over  it.  As  you  near  it  a 
voice  back  of  a  swinging  lantern  cries  "  Hello,  Cap 
tain  Jack,"  and  in  a  minute  your  boat  scrapes  the 
wharfs  of  the  Mysterious  Island. 

I  need  not  tell  you  what  you  will  find  there — ex 
cept  that  it  will  be  a  hearty  welcome,  a  spring-bed  in 
a  bark  cottage  within  a  few  feet  of  the  lake,  a  number 
of  good  guides,  a  raging  hunger,  and  health  and  hap 
piness  from  day  to  day. 

Good-speed  to  you,  and  a  safe  return. 


52 


NOVELS  THAT   EVERYBODY  READ 


"LORD  ORMONT  AND  HIS  AMINTA" 

THE  women  in  the  novels  of  George  Meredith  are  so 
fascinating  that  beside  them  real  women  some 
times  seem  to  be  the  phantoms  of  the  imagination. 
He  makes  them  charm  you  always  by  their  union  of 
feminine  qualities  with  a  certain  strength  at  a  crisis. 
Almost  without  exception  the  women  in  Meredith's 
novels  think,  and  occasionally  act  on  reason.  But 
the  sign  of  their  womanliness  is  that  at  the  last  they 
follow  the  lead  of  a  dominant  passion.  That  is  why 
men  are  fascinated  by  them. 

The  heroine  in  his  romance  of  "Lord  Ormont 
and  his  Aminta"  adds  another  striking  portrait  to 
his  gallery  of  fair  women.  Aminta  is  not  the  speaker 
of  epigrams,  as  so  many  of  his  great  characters  are  ; 
in  this  novel  that  role  is  reserved  for  Lady  Charlotte, 
a  truly  wonderful  study  of  an  elderly  woman  of  strong 
intellect  and  persistent,  vital  affections.  But  Aminta 
permeates  this  story  with  her  beauty,  her  physical 
poise,  her  clear-sightedness  in  a  great  moral  crisis. 
She  is  a  woman  who  rebels  against  the  false  position 
in  which  she  is  placed,  without  indulging  in  hysterics 
or  heroics.  That  is  unusual  in  either  fiction  or  life. 
55 


There  is  a  dignity  about  her  rebellion,  such  as  char 
acterizes  a  strong  man  when  he  is  making  up  his 
mind  ;  he  does  not  show  his  opponent  the  processes 
by  which  he  is  reaching  a  conclusion. 

The  situation  developed  in  the  closing  chapters  of 
the  novel  is  one  of  unusual  complexity.  How  can 
any  one  justify  a  beautiful,  true  woman  in  leaving  so 
fine  a  type  of  man  as  Lord  Ormont — "a  chivalrous 
gentleman  up  to  the  bounds  of  his  intelligence  !  "  The 
justification  is  found  in  what  is  fundamental  in  all 
Meredith's  novels — the  very  root  of  his  strength  and 
his  optimism.  From  Fever  el  to  Ormont ;he  has  never 
ceased  to  show  the  divine  right  of  every  man  and 
woman  to  seize  the  one  great  chance  of  emotional, 
mental,  and  spiritual  growth  that  comes  of  the  per 
fect  companionship  of  a  man  and  woman  who  love 
each  other  with  all  their  strength.  We  are  all  in  the 
hands  of  a  great  power  which  Meredith  calls  Nature, 
working  bylaws  which  at  best  we  can  only  imperfectly 
comprehend.  But  one  thing  we  can  do — and  that  is 
follow  the  dictates  of  Nature,  the  great  primal  impulse 
that  forces  us  on  to  the  best  that  is  in  us  unless  we 
thwart  it.  Meredith  always  shows  the  inevitable 
consequences  of  thus  going  against  "  the  laws  which 
men  have  made  for  their  own  convenience."  He  is 
not  an  Anarchist ;  he  believes  in  law,  but  he  also 
believes  in  the  right  of  real  strength  and  integrity  to 
choose  out  its  own  path,  even  if  it  goes  at  cross- 
purposes  to  the  law.  Whether  one  accepts  his  philos 
ophy  or  not,  one  cannot  fail  to  note  how  he  has 
56 


worked  out  the  doctrine  of  individualism  in  strict 
accord  with  the  best  teachings  of  contemporary  sci 
ence. 

To  many  readers  this  novel  will  appeal  as  the  latest 
expression  of  the  literary  art  of  the  foremost  living 
writer  of  fiction  in  English.  They  will  make  the  in 
evitable  comparison  with  "  Feverel,"  "  Harry  Rich 
mond,"  and  "  Diana,"  to  see  whether  at  sixty-seven 
the  master's  hand  retains  the  old-time  skill  of  the  great 
artist.  Whatever  doubts  they  may  have  will  vanish 
when  they  reach  the  chapter  entitled  "  The  Marine 
Duet. ' '  There  the  old  fervor,  the  zest  of  living,  the 
lyric  quality  of  love,  confiscate  and  sing  and  soar  in 
language  so  strong,  so  musical,  so  inspiring,  that  the 
novelist  is  lost  in  the  poet,  and  both  in  the  emotion 
which  they  stimulate. 


57 


"THE  MANXMAN" 

R  GREAT  deal  has  been  said  in  England  against  the 
three-volume  novel  as  a  work  of  art,  as  well  as 
against  its  commercial  qualities  ;  and  yet  it  has  been 
responsible  for  a  number  of  masterpieces  in  English 
fiction  that  surely  would  have  failed  of  force  and  in 
tellectual  breadth  if  compressed  into  a  single  volume. 
It  has  no  doubt  produced  great  wastes  of  stupidity  and 
clulness,  but  when  you  really  come  across  a  big  fertile 
genius  he  needs  three  volumes  in  which  to  show  his 
pace.  You  can't  exhibit  the  qualities  of  an  ocean 
"  liner  "  on  a  frog-pond.  There  is  a  lot  of  satisfaction 
in  reading  a  novel  that  is  long  enough  to  introduce 
you  leisurely  to  a  whole  community,  as  well  as  to 
a  pair  of  lovers.  The  intellectual  "  sprinting  "  that 
we  call  short  stories  and  novelettes  is  good  enough  for 
mere  cleverness.  But  it  is  boys'  work  after  all,  and 
is  apt  to  stop  growth  of  power  and  fancy. 

When  Hall  Caine  wrote  "The  Manxman,"  he 
had  the  advantage  of  a  big  canvas,  and  strength  and 
force  enough  to  fill  it.  The  artistic  effect  of  such  a 
book  is  cumulative.  The  author  can  show  his  versa 
tility  without  jarring  your  nerves  by  sudden  changes 
58 


of  style  and  motive.  The  finest  achievement  in 
"The  Manxman"  is  the  creation  of  a  lot  of  minor 
characters  and  incidents,  which,  though  distinct  in 
themselves,  are  inextricably  woven  into  the  great 
catastrophe.  A  small  writer  or  a  small  volume  would 
have  deprived  us  of  these.  The  detail  of  Manxland 
is  as  carefully  worked  into  this  story  as  Miss  Wilkins's 
New  England  characteristics  into  her  tales.  It  is  ap 
plying  the  methods  of  modern  realism  to  the  creation 
of  a  romance. 

The  book  to  which  ' '  The  Manxman ' '  has  been 
compared  several  times  is  "  The  Scarlet  Letter  " — be 
cause  of  a  certain  correspondence,  with  a  contrast,  in 
the  motive.  But  it  seems  to  me  that  there  is  far 
more  reason  to  compare  it  artistically  with  "Adam 
Bede  " — particularly  as  to  the  two  women  who  sin — 
Kate  and  Hetty.  There  is  a  verity  about  these 
women — their  rude  beauty,  their  intensity,  and  their 
infatuations — that  adds  immensely  to  the  attractions 
of  a  book  which  is,  no  doubt,  often  a  bit  repulsive  in 
its  remorseless  pictures  of  human  ignorance  and  weak 
ness. 

But  the  exhibition  of  the  author's  skill  is  in  the 
development  of  the  characters  of  Philip  and  Pete — a 
wonderful  bit  of  psychology,  which  is  pursued  to  its 
last  analysis. 

In  spite  of  all  this,  a  sensitive  reader  will  feel  that 
the  novel  has  failed  a  little  of  the  highest  artistic  ef 
fect.  And  he  will  trace  the  weak  spot  to  the  persist 
ent  effort  to  create  scenes  which  are  theatrically 
59 


effective.  The  writer  is  always  conscious  of  the 
stage -setting,  the  distribution  of  characters,  and,  as 
it  were,  the  lime-light  effects.  Admirable  as  Pete  is 
in  conception  and  development,  you  are  persistently 
aware  of  his  wonderful  advantages  as  a  part  for  a  ro 
mantic  actor  of  big  voice  and  handsome  presence. 

That  sort  of  talent  always  commands  a  good  audi 
ence,  but  it  is  not  the  best  audience.  Hugo  and 
Dickens  and  Dumas  pleased  both  the  literary  and 
dramatic  audiences — but  they  are  exceptions.  You 
don't  want  to  dramatize  the  novels  of  George  Mere 
dith  or  Thackeray.  The  foot-lights  would  kill  the 
delicate  fancy,  the  flights  of  imagination,  the  fascinat 
ing  style  that  is  the  immortal  part  of  them. 


60 


"TRILBY" 

"  TRILBY  "  is  the  beautiful  story  of  three  men  who 
1  loved  each  other  as  brothers,  and  a  woman 
who  loved  them  all  with  that  sort  of  comradeship 
that  one  expects  from  his  dearest  friend.  That  is 
why  you  have  heard  so  many  men  talking  about  the 
story  ;  for  men,  more  than  women,  have  a  genius  for 
comradeship.  But  you  seldom  find  it  in  the  modern 
novel,  which  is  given  over  to  the  immature  love  of  boys 
and  girls,  or  to  an  analysis  of  the  meannesses  of  men 
and  women.  But  Taffy,  the  Laird,  and  Little  Billee 
were  bound  together  by  that  kind  of  friendship  that 
seldom  gets  into  books  ;  you  can't  generalize  about 
it  or  give  recipes  for  it  in  platitudes.  You  only  know 
that  it  can't  be  found  among  men  who  are  without 
that  depth  and  fidelity  in  their  emotions  which  is 
called  honor.  It  is  not  a  matter  of  culture  or  aesthet 
ics — for  Kipling's  "  Soldiers  Three  "  exhibit  it  in  as 
admirable  a  manner  as  Du  Manner's  "  three  guards 
men  of  the  brush."  Pleasure  and  good-fellowship  may 
have  had  much  to  do  with  the  beginnings  of  such  com 
radeship,  but,  when  it  is  once  established,  their  office 
ends  ;  for  the  test  of  comradeship  is  the  hardships  and 
61 


the  sorrows  that  are  endured  in  its  name.  It  is  one  of 
the  permanent  things  of  life  that  give  it  continuity. 
The  beautiful  thing  about  it  all  is  that  it  carries  with 
it  none  of  those  generally  accepted  obligations  that  are 
called  duties.  The  whole  relationship  is  so  absolutely 
voluntary. 

Now  Trilby  made  her  first  appeal  to  these  men,  be 
cause  she  had  the  faculty  of  taking  a  man's  views  of 
comradeship.  She  saw  what  a  genuine,  unselfish  thing- 
it  was  ;  she  grasped,  what  so  many  women  of  finer 
opportunities  seldom  understand  —  the  meaning  of 
honor  among  men.  She  did  not  ask  them  to  pity, 
protect,  or  flatter  or  pet  her  (the  appeal  which  most 
women  make) — she  simply  said  "  Let  me  be  your 
comrade  on  the  same  terms  that  you  are  each  other's 
comrades.  I  ask  no  quarter  because  I  am  a  woman." 
She  had  lost  her  honor  among  women,  but  she  kept 
a  man's  standard  of  honor  to  the  uttermost — "  to 
think  of  other  people  before  myself,  and  never  to  tell 
lies  or  be  afraid." 

But  Trilby  was  a  beautiful,  magnetic  woman,  as 
well  as  a  comrade,  and  so  Little  Billee  and  Taffy 
loved  her  with  a  great  passion.  One  of  them  gave 
his  life  for  it ;  the  other,  because  he  was  stronger, 
grew  to  be  a  finer,  nobler  man  by  reason  of  it. 

The  four  characters  in  this  story  have  become  to 
thousands  of  readers  like  real  people.  That  is,  per 
haps,  the  highest  tribute  that  one  can  pay  to  Du 
Maurier  as  a  writer.  His  art  has  been  so  fine  that 
he  has  made  real  for  us  his  visions.  The  style  of 
62 


the  narrative  is  so  spontaneous,  so  unconventional 
that  one  feels  that  it  is  the  veracious  record  of 
real  experiences.  Du  Maurier  is  not  afraid  of  his 
emotions — they  bubble  up  and  sparkle  from  a  clear 
spring.  They  are  not  meant  for  analysis,  but  for  en 
joyment.  That  is  why  people  are  saying  that  he 
writes  in  the  manner  of  the  last  generation.  It  is, 
one  suspects,  the  sort  of  spontaneity  that  comes  from 
hard  work.  The  soul  of  the  artist  felt  deeply,  saw 
clearly,  and  then  worked  away  with  the  instrument 
of  language  till  his  vision  was  made  plain  to  others. 
That  is  not  an  easy  thing  to  do  ;  and  the  greater  the 
artist,  the  harder  the  work.  For  he  alone  is  fully  con 
scious  of  the  imperfections  of  language  at  its  best  to 
image  the  mind  of  man. 

As  for  the  hypnotic  machinery  of  the  story  which 
evolves  the  two  Trilby  s,  it  is  easy  to  overrate  its 
originality  and  importance.  As  long  ago  as  "  The 
Blithedale  Romance ' '  of  Hawthorne,  and  as  recent 
ly  as  the  "  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde"  of  Stevenson, 
the  dramatic  possibilities  of  a  dual  personality  were 
artistically  treated  in  powerful  romances.  Du  Maurier 
uses  the  device  effectively,  and  in  the  very  last  chap 
ter  pushes  it  to  the  verge  of  melodrama,  when  Trilby 
dying  is  hypnotized  by  Svengali's  picture. 

The  charm  of  the  story  is  entirely  apart  from  the 
machinery  ;  it  lies  in  the  region  of  genuine  emotion 
which  springs  from  a  zest  for  living.  Notwithstand 
ing  its  pathetic  ending,  the  story  is  profoundly  opti 
mistic —  for  it  breeds  faith  in  human  nature,  respect 
63 


for  individuality,  and  a  manly  sympathy  for  error. 
It  is  such  a  lonely  world  to  live  in  without  these 
things — so  lonely  that  when  men  lose  faith  in  them 
all,  they  often  voluntarily  end  their  lives. 

Stories  like  "  Trilby  "  help  to  make  it  less  lonely 
— for  they  give  the  emotions  something  to  cling  to — 

"A  little  warmth,  a  little  light 
Of  Love's  bestowing — and  so  good-night !  " 


64 


"TESS  OF   THE  D'URBERVILLES" 

TO  tell  a  new  story  in  an  old  manner,  to  be  idyllic 
while  unfolding  a  tragedy,  to  make  the  reader 
sympathize  with  a  crime,  to  write  a  tale  of  the  pres 
ent  day  which  is  absolutely  unconscious  of  railroads, 
telegraphs,  and  the  worries  of  modern  life — these  are 
some  of  the  anomalies  in  Thomas  Hardy's  novel, 
"  Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles." 

You  are  caught  in  the  meshes  of  the  tale  before 
you  realize  it,  and  are  carried  to  a  romantic  region. 
The  sweet  breath  of  the  country  is  in  your  nostrils, 
and  the  winds  from  the  Wessex  valleys  cool  your 
brow.  While  you  read  there  is  no  woman  in  the 
world  but  Tess,  and  to  you,  as  to  Clare  in  the  light 
of  early  morning,  she  is  no  longer  the  milkmaid,  but 
"a  visionary  essence  of  woman — a  whole  sex  con 
densed  into  one  typical  form." 

There  is  a  Greek  largeness  and  simplicity  about 
Tess  which  is  very  appealing.  The  nervous  sub 
tleties  of  the  modern  woman  are  unknown  to  her. 
When  she  is  happy  it  is  an  exaltation  in  which  her 
strong  body  bears  her  up  to  a  level  plain  of  joy  and 
keeps  her  there.  About  it  there  is  nothing  hysterical. 
65 


She  has  no  imaginary  sorrows  ;  when  they  come,  big, 
real,  crushing,  she  puts  her  shoulders  under  them  like 
a  man,  and  struggles  on — never  stopping  to  whimper, 
or  cry  at  fate.  You  realize  that  she  is  not  indifferent, 
but  is  suffering  keenly  ;  that  she  thinks  deeply  as  Avell 
as  feels,  and  that  she  has  an  intellectual  interest  in 
the  riddle  of  life. 

You  are  never  unconscious  of  the  physical  suprem 
acy  of  Tess — the  very  womanly  charm  of  her  which 
accounts  for  so  much  that  is  both  sad  and  happy  in 
the  story.  "  You  are  like  an  undulating  billow 
warmed  by  the  sun,"  said  the  infatuated  Clare  as  he 
carried  her,  "and  all  this  fluff  of  muslin  about  you 
is  the  froth."  And  that  other  picture  of  her,  just 
waking  from  an  afternoon  sleep  :  "  She  was  yawning, 
and  he  saw  the  red  interior  of  her  mouth  as  if  it  had 
been  a  snake's.  She  had  stretched  one  arm  so  high 
above  her  coiled-up  cable  of  hair  that  he  could  see  its 
delicacy  above  the  sunburn  ;  her  face  was  flushed  with 
sleep,  and  her  eyelids  hung  heavy  over  their  pupils. 
It  was  a  moment  when  a  woman  is  more  incarnate 
than  at  any  other  time." 

Indeed,  in  the  first  four  books  of  this  novel  it  is 
hard  to  find  a  flaw.  They  are  written  in  the  won 
derfully  melodious  English  of  which  Hardy  has  long 
been  an  acknowledged  master;  the  pastoral  atmo 
sphere  saturates  them ;  landscape  after  landscape 
springs  into  view  and  dissolves  with  the  shifting  of 
the  breeze ;  and,  above  all,  men  and  women  live  in 
this  atmosphere  and  breathe  the  enchanted  air.  So 
66 


far  it  is  a  beautiful  romantic  love-story,  touching  the 
deepest  passions  but  permitting  them  to  work  out 
their  own  salvation. 

Then,  in  what  seems  to  be  sheer  perversity,  the 
cloud  of  melodrama  settles  over  the  book.  At  one 
bound  you  are  transported  from  the  bracing  air  of 
the  Wessex  meadows  to  the  stuffy  atmosphere  of  a 
modern  theatre.  You  can  almost  hear  the  shifting  of 
the  scenery,  the  whistle  of  the  stage  machinist,  and 
see  the  changing  color  of  the  lights.  The  whole 
business  of  the  tragedy  is  theatrical  and  unreal ;  the 
murder,  the  last  happy  night  when  Tess  slept  on  the 
altar  of  the  Druids,  and  the  final  scene  of  the  black 
flag  rising  over  the  prison  are  cleverly  devised  stage 
pictures  which  would  make  the  fortune  of  a  different 
type  of  novel,  but  are  utterly  incongruous  here. 

The  culmination  of  it  all  is  a  needless  bit  of  cruelty. 
The  reader  closes  the  book  with  the  impression  that 
he  has  been  defrauded  of  his  sympathies,  and  he  half- 
believes  that  the  Home  Secretary  pardoned  Tcss  at 
the  last  minute. 


67 


"THE   PRISONER  OF  ZENDA " 

THE  wave  of  romance  which  has  made  the  books  of 
Stanley  J.  Weyman  popular,  has  carried  forward 
"  The  Prisoner  of  Zenda,"  by  Anthony  Hope  (Haw 
kins).  Most  boys  play  at  "being  king,"  and  this 
story  carries  on  the  play.  Not  only  does  the  young 
Englishman  play  at  being  king,  but  he  makes  love  to 
the  real  king's  best  girl.  If  there  is  anything  more 
fascinating  in  romance  than  the  king  business,  it  is 
making  love  to  a  princess  without  any  responsibility 
to  marry  her.  Indeed,  in  the  whole  story  the  young 
Englishman  has  the  best  of  the  real  king  all  the  time. 
Of  course  he  has  to  kill  a  few  people  now  and  then, 
but  that  is  simply  rare  sport  for  a  healthy  Englishman. 

Moreover,  this  story  has  lots  of  other  stage  proper 
ties  of  the  old-fashioned  sort.  There  is  an  unhealthy 
moat,  and  a  drawbridge  that  creaks  on  its  hinges,  and 
a  dungeon  cell.  In  the  human  way,  also,  it  is  well 
supplied  with  gentlemanly  assassins,  treacherous  con 
fidential  servants,  and,  better  than  all  else,  a  beau 
tiful  but  wicked  woman,  who  loves  the  villain,  but 
saves  the  life  of  his  enemy. 

What  more  can  the  children  of  the  decade,  who  are 
68 


saturated  with  reality,  ask  for — unless  it  be  a  fairy 
godmother?  There  is  a  great  deal  to  be  said  for  fairy 
godmothers  in  a  story.  They  make  it  easier  for  the 
novelist  when  he  gets  the  plot  tied  into  knots.  The 
beautiful  but  wicked  siren  fills  the  part  in  a  way  in 
this  tale,  though  she  has  her  limitations.  But  a  fairy 
godmother  does  not  bother  with  the  ordinary  rules  of 
the  game.  That  is  why  we  need  to  have  her  restored 
to  full  standing  in  the  new  school  of  old  romance. 

But,  gentlemen  of  the  new  school,  whatever  you 
leave  out  of  your  stories,  give  us  plenty  of  blood  ! 
Not  ordinary  blood  spilt  in  brutal  murders — we  get 
enough  of  that  in  the  newspapers — but  fine  blue  blood 
shed  in  a  gentlemanly  way  with  plenty  of  "  gadzooks ' ' 
and  "  by  my  halidom  "  to  accompany  it.  We  have 
a  preference  for  rapiers  and  broadswords  as  the 
weapons,  because  the  reporters  have  made  us  suspect 
that  a  "  Smith  &  Wesson  32  calibre"  is  a  rather 
vulgar  weapon. 

We  have  nothing  but  prai.se  for  the  way  in  which 
the  hero  of  this  story  kills  men.  When  it  has  to  be 
done  he  makes  clean  work  of  it — even  when  he  is 
compelled  to  run  a  knife  into  the  man  who  is  asleep 
in  a  boat. 

We  have  only  one  fault  to  find  with  him — he  ought 
to  have  run  off  with  the  beautiful  princess.  When  he 
restored  the  real  king  to  his  kingdom  he  satisfied  the 
moralities  enough.  The  laws  of  romance  demand 
that  a  genuine  hero  should  be  devilish  enough  to  run 
away  with  a  beautiful  woman  when  he  has  the  chance. 
69 


This  is  the  only  indication  in  the  book  that  the  mod 
ern  Englishman  has  fallen  away  from  the  standard  of 
the  middle  ages. 

In  the  meantime,  where  is  the  American  School  of 
Romance?  A  contemporary  cynic  says  that  it  is 
attending  afternoon  teas  and  kettledrums  ! 


70 


"  SHIPS  THAT  PASS  IN  THE   NIGHT" 

THERE  is  something  more  satisfactory  in  the  suc- 
1  cess  of  Miss  Beatrice  Harraden's  stones,  "Ships 
that  Pass  in  the  Night,"  and  "In  Varying  Moods" 
than  in  tales  of  specious  cleverness  like  "  Dodo,"  for, 
at  any  rate,  they  are  in  dead  earnest  about  a  few 
things  of  some  significance.  Moreover,  they  are  writ 
ten  with  considerable  respect  for  the  English  lan 
guage  as  a  vehicle  for  thought  transference,  and  with 
a  commendable  knowledge  of  its  best  traditions.  The 
style  has  an  even,  often  a  glittering  edge  on  it,  that 
cuts  into  the  core  of  things,  straight  and  clean.  That 
is  why  people  of  small  literary  capability  are  pleased 
with  the  stories  (they  are  so  easily  understood),  and, 
at  the  same  time  people  of  some  fastidiousness  read 
them  without  shrugging  their  shoulders. 

But  what  counts  for  the  stories,  more  than  all  else, 
is  the  sense  of  reality  which  they  convey.  No 
amount  of  work  or  knowledge  can  give  this  ;  a  writer 
either  has  the  image-creating  power,  or  he  has  not. 
If  he  has  he  will  be  read,  even  though  he  violates 
most  of  the  laws  of  the  English  language,  and  all  of 
the  Ten  Commandments.  If  the  characters  have 


reality,  the  reader  will  follow  them,  good  or  bad,  to 
the  end  of  the  story.  As  Wharton  says  in  "  Mar- 
cella,"  you  get  the  thrill  from  them  and  that  is  what 
most  people  are  living  for. 

For  example  take  the  longest  story  in  "In  Varying 
Moods  " — the  first  few  pages  domesticate  the  reader 
comfortably  at  the  Green  Dragon.  He  could  find 
it  without  a  map,  and  would  recognize  Mrs.  Ben- 
bow  at  the  door.  That  is  a  literary  accomplishment 
of  some  importance  at  a  time  when  many  novels  leave 
their  characters  in  a  haze  at  the  very  last  chapter — 
the  writers  having  expended  most  of  their  energy  on 
the  epigrams  or  social  problems  of  the  book,  while 
the  characters  shifted  for  themselves. 

But  the  thing  which  seems  all  wrong  about  Miss 
Harraden's  stories  is  the  attitude  of  the  author  and 
her  people  toward  the  often  amusing  spectacle  which 
is  called  living.  Almost  without  exception  her  stories 
end  in  death  or  heart-breaking  renunciation.  True, 
there  is  a  certain  stoicism  about  it  all,  which  seems 
to  say,  "  Of  course,  I  am  not  making  much  fuss 
about  this,  but,  ye  gods,  how  I  suffer  !  "  If  you  are 
the  right  kind  of  a  reader  you  are  expected  to  aid  in 
the  silent  suffering  yourself.  That  is  part  of  the  thrill 
for  which  you  paid. 

But  if  you  are  a  man  or  woman  with  the  blood  of 
health  in  your  heart,  you  will  say,  after  a  little  spasm 
of  silent  suffering,  "  How  much  better  I  should  have 
felt  if  I  had  played  two  sets  of  tennis  or  taken  a  ten- 
mile  ride  !  Some  day,  perhaps,  I'll  have  to  meet 
72 


the  real  thing,  and  this  simulation  of  it  won't  make 
me  any  braver."  Or,  maybe,  "I  endured  tenfold 
these  sorrows  once  myself,  and  this  book  reopens  the 
old  wound.  Why  did  I  read  it?  " 

Of  course  if  you  are  one  of  the  melancholy  contin 
gent  who  make  a  profession  out  of  sorrow  (your  own 
and  other  people's),  we  have  nothing  to  say.  "  Ships 
that  Pass  in  the  Night  "  is  just  what  you  want ;  you'll 
get  your  own  particular  kind  of  thrill  out  of  it,  and 
plenty  out  of  it. 

But  after  you've  read  it,  walk  out  on  the  hills  at 
sunset,  and  let  the  breeze  from  off  the  wheat-fields 
play  around  your  face,  and  take  a  deep  breath  when 
it  has  the  perfume  of  clover  in  it ;  then  watch  the 
color  glowing  in  the  sky,  and  thank  great  nature  that 
you  are  alive,  and  part  of  it  all. 


73 


"KATHARINE  LAUDERDALE" 

*PHE  easiest  thing  to  say  about  an  author  who  writes 
1  a  great  deal  is  that  his  latest  book  is  not  the 
equal  of  certain  of  his  previous  works ;  the  particular 
one  which  a  reader  or  critic  selects  for  this  com 
parison  is  always  the  book  which  happens  to  have 
left  the  most  vivid  impression  on  his  mind.  Now  a 
vivid  impression  depends  on  so  many  things — on 
health  for  instance,  on  the  pleasant  surroundings,  on 
the  hour  of  the  day,  or  the  weather.  That  is  why 
such  comparisons  are  usually  worthless.  What  does 
your  opinion  that  "  Mr.  Isaacs  "  is  a  far  better  novel 
than  "Katharine  Lauderdale "  amount  to,  when 
your  friends  know  that  in  the  ten  years  between  the 
two  you  have  not  only  grown  older,  but  have  lost 
your  dearly  beloved  wife,  or  failed  in  your  political 
ambition,  or  developed  a  persistent  gout  in  your  left 
foot? 

Neither  is  it  of  any  more  significance  for  the  writer 
to  say  that  for  him  "  Katharine  "  is  a  far  better  novel 
than  "  Mr.  Isaacs  "  or  any  other  novel  Mr.  Crawford 
ever  wrote  —  except  perhaps  "  Saracinesca "  and 
"The  Tale  of  a  Lonely  Parish"— just  because  the 
74 


sun  is  shining  when  he  writes  after  a  week  of  snow 
and  rain,  and  the  birds  are  chirping  in  the  square, 
and  a  bit  of  blue  sky  shows  tremulously  over  the 
cornice  across  the  street.  The  only  safe  thing,  it 
seems,  in  judging  of  books,  is  to  know  why  you  like 
or  dislike  them,  and  leave  comparisons  alone. 

You  like  "Katharine  Lauderdale  "  no  doubt  be 
cause  it  is  so  thoroughly  a  modern  story — and  yet 
conscious  of  a  dignified  past,  which  is  an  inseparable 
part  of  the  development  of  any  society,  even  New 
York  society.  The  valuable  thing  in  Mr.  Crawford's 
writing  a  New  York  story  is  that  he  has  been  in  that 
city  enough  at  long  intervals  really  to  see  things  at 
first  hand,  and  yet  he  has  been  away  so  much  in  other 
great  cities  that  he  does  not  put  things  in  that  exag 
gerated  perspective  that  in  novels  is  called  "provin 
cialism."  For  a  man  may  spend  his  whole  life  in  a 
great  city,  and  see  the  best  that  it  affords,  and  yet  be 
provincial  in  his  judgments.  No  doubt  there  are 
many  things  in  "  Katharine  "  which  real  New 
Yorkers  consider  unessential  or  not  in  accord  with 
the  reality.  There  are  also,  no  doubt,  omissions  of 
many  things  which  New  York  considers  the  very 
essence  of  itself.  But  to  many  readers  the  very  de 
tachment  of  Mr.  Crawford's  view  will  be  its  chief 
charm. 

"Katharine"  is,  moreover,  charming  for  its  dia 
logue,  which  is  bright  without  being  affected,  crisp 
without  being  cynical.     The  people  in  the  book  pre 
serve  a  reasonable  dignity  in  their  conversations  with 
75 


each  other,  and  yet  it  is  not  "  stage  dignity,"  which 
so  many  novelists  consider  the  real  thing. 

The  achievement  of  the  book,  however,  which  will 
best  stand  all  moods  and  weathers,  is  the  admirable 
creation  and  characterization  of  the  whole  Lauderdale 
family — their  evolution  and  present  social  dependen 
cies.  It  is  the  first  time  in  American  fiction  that  any 
such  breadth  of  view  has  shown  itself  in  the  study  of 
our  social  framework.  It  suggests  the  opportunity 
for  many  other  novels  as  good  as  this  one.  Mr. 
Crawford  has  shown  very  clearly  that  there  is  bet 
ter  material  for  stories  of  American  life  than  the  love 
agonies  of  detached  young  men  and  women,  or  the 
elaborately  bad  English  of  uninteresting  people,  which 
we  call  "  dialect." 

The  story  of  "  Katharine  "  is  continued  in  "  The 
Ralstons,"  a  very  long  novel  which  succeeds  in  hold 
ing  your  attention  in  spite  of  an  unusual  number  of 
digressions  that  seem  to  delay  the  plot. 

It  is  not  an  agreeable  story — the  bickerings  of  the 
Lauderdale  family  being  frequent  and  exceedingly 
irritating.  But  it  is  something  of  a  task  to  show 
the  strange  results  of  an  inherited  family  temper 
working  in  different  personalities.  There  is  a  great 
deal  of  truth  in  this  presentation  of  a  strong  fam 
ily  trait — one  of  the  kind  which  makes  the  mem 
bers  of  the  family  charming  people  to  outsiders, 
but  very  annoying  to  each  other.  They  have  a 
keen  appreciation  of  each  other's  virtues,  but  when 
brought  together  their  eccentricities  clash.  They 
76 


know  it  is  foolish,    but  for  their  lives  they  cannot 
change  it. 

One  of  the  best  characters  that  the  author  has  ever 
drawn  is  the  old  millionaire,  Robert  Lauderdale — a 
portrait  of  great  strength,  and  unusual  pathos  of  a 
virile  kind.  The  chapters  describing  his  illness  and 
death  are  the  best  in  the  book — full  of  dignity  and 
dramatic  force. 


77 


THE  " JUNGLE  BOOK" 

THE  best  book  to  write  about  is  one  that  the  critic 
has  read  with  real  enthusiasm  ;  for  then  some  of 
his  enthusiasm,  no  matter  how  ill-natured  he  is,  will 
creep  into  what  he  writes,  and  some  one  will  read  a 
stimulating  book  by  reason  of  it.  To  that  extent  a 
critic  may  be,  occasionally,  a  public  benefactor. 
And  that  is  why  "  The  Jungle  Book,"  by  Rudyard 
Kipling,  demands  recognition.  Kipling  is  so  easily 
king  among  his  fellows  in  a  certain  kind  of  narrative 
fiction,  and  has  been  so  much  praised  that  it  is  diffi 
cult  to  say  anything  new  about  him.  But  he  has 
the  astounding  habit  of  always  doing  some  entirely 
new  thing  in  a  strikingly  original  way.  Therefore, 
even  commonplace  readers  are  moved  to  say  new 
things  about  him. 

Surely  there  is  no  prototype  for  "  The  Jungle 
Book  "  in  either  juvenile  or  grown-up  literature.  The 
nearest  thing  to  it  in  English  is  "  Uncle  Remus," 
and  the  similarity  goes  no  farther  than  the  extraordi 
nary  way  in  which  both  Harris  and  Kipling  get  into 
the  personality  of  animals  and  make  them  real  and 
individual  for  the  reader. 

78 


The  book  was  in  the  main  written  for  children, 
and  one  can  imagine  that  a  bright  child  would  be  fas 
cinated  with  parts  of  it,  even  though  the  strange  and 
uncouth  words  might  be  gibberish  to  him.  For  a 
child  and  a  negro  have  an  insatiable  appetite  for 
words  with  a  big  or  curious  sound.  The  prime  con 
dition  is  that  they  must  suggest  something  to  his 
imagination.  There  must  be  something  wrong  with 
a  boy  who  would  not  sit  up  late  to  hear  "  Rikki- 
Tikki-Tavi  "  read  to  him  ;  for  the  daring  little  mon 
goose  who  is  the  hero  of  the  tale,  possesses  most  of 
the  virtues  that  a  .boy  worships — fidelity  to  his  chum, 
cunning  in  schemes  to  outwit  his  enemy,  and  blood- 
thirstiness  in  the  presence  of  the  foe. 

But  one  fancies  that  grown-up  boys,  from  twenty- 
five  to  sixty,  will  get  most  fun  out  of  "  The  Jungle 
Book. ' '  And  if  they  happen  to  know  a  little  about 
the  art  of  writing,  their  pleasure  will  be  increased. 
For  the  book  has  some  writing  in  it  to  make  artists  in 
the  business  jealous  ;  for  example,  the  night  ride  of 
little  Tomai  on  the  big  elephant  to  the  great  elephant 
dance  in  the  jungle.  It  is  hard  to  find  in  Kipling  a 
more  weird  or  effective  piece  of  description — the  very 
soul  of  the  jungle  seems  to  be  caught  in  it,  and,  for 
the  time,  you  are  part  of  an  unknown  world. 

Of  equal  imaginative  force  is  the  story  of  "  The 
White  Seal" — perhaps' the  best  story  in  the  volume. 
It  is  a  complete  refutation  of  the  charge  that  when 
Kipling  leaves  India  he  is  out  of  his  element,  and  his 
work  falls  off.  This  tale  moves  about  in  the  depths 
79 


of  the  sea,  from  the  Arctic  regions  to  the  equator — and 
the  reader  is  impressed  with  the  same  sense  of  reality 
that  held  him  in  the  Indian  jungle. 

The  book  contains  several  incidental  poems  that 
perhaps  meant  something  to  little  Moivgli,  the  wolf- 
child,  but  will  puzzle  the  intellect  of  any  one  not 
educated  by  the  Seeonee  Pack.  But  even  when  they 
are  obscure,  you  have  a  clear  sense  of  the  fact  that 
nobody  other  than  Kipling  could  have  written  them. 
Whatever  he  does  he  is  always  Kipling — and  in  dead 
earnest  about  his  work. 


80 


"  PEMBROKE  " 

IT  is  very  easy  to  speak  in  unreserved  praise  of  the 
technical  ability  in  Miss  Wilkins's  novel  "  Pem 
broke."  She  never  hesitates  in  conveying  the  im 
pression  of  a  scene  or  a  situation  as  it  is  present  to  her 
mental  vision  ;  there  it  is,  all  set  down  on  the  page 
in  direct,  simple  sentences  that  follow  each  other  with 
the  precision  of  soldiers  on  parade.  Her  style  goes 
clipping  and  clicking  its  way  through  the  pages  like  a 
well-geared  and  sharpened  reaper  through  a  field  of 
wheat.  Nothing  is  left  for  the  reader's  imagination, 
not  even  the  gleanings.  He  simply  sits  on  the  fence 
and  sees  this  efficient  literary  machine  cut  a  broad 
swath  through  reality,  bind  it  in  orderly  sheaves,  and 
set  them  in  a  row.  He  may  not  like  the  grain,  but 
there  is  nothing  but  admiration  in  his  soul  for  the 
machine  that  is  doing  the  work. 

As  for  "  Pembroke  "  itself — the  obvious  thing  is 
to  compare  it  with  "  Cranford."  It  conveys  a  simi 
lar  sense  of  the  reality  of  an  insignificant  village — 
and  the  unreality,  and,  moreover,  unimportance  of  the 
rest  of  the  world.  While  you  are  reading  "  Pem 
broke,"  there  is  no  other  standard  of  civilization  or 
Si 


morality  in  your  mind  than  Pembroke's.  A  writer  of 
fiction  can  go  no  farther  than  that  in  the  line  of  verity. 

Moreover,  with  all  its  simplicity  of  life  and  char 
acter.,  the  novel  contains  three  or  four  scenes  of  real 
dramatic  intensity — situations  evolved  as  naturally  as 
in  life,  and  full  of  pathos  and  tragedy.  With  admir 
able  restraint  in  language,  these  scenes  are  set  down 
without  a  touch  of  the  melodramatic.  Pre-eminent 
among  them  are  the  flight  of  Rebecca,  the  journey  of 
Sylvia  to  the  poor-house,  and  the  death  of  Ephraim. 
There  is  a  severity,  a  sternness,  an  inevitableness  in 
all  these  chronicles  that  suggest  the  Hebraic  proto 
types  on  which  the  old  New  England  character  was 
modelled. 

There  are  two  or  three  touches  of  moral  allegory  in 
the  novel  (like  the  veil  over  the  face  of  Sylvia,  and 
the  imaginary  crook  in  the  back  of  Barney}  that 
remind  one  of  the  methods  of  the  great  romancer 
who  wrote  "The  Minister's  Black  Veil."  This  is  a 
line  of  comparison  which  the  most  skilful  of  modern 
writers  might  hesitate  to  indicate. 

The  reader,  not  a  New  Englander,  will  close  the 
book  with  admiration  for  the  writer's  skill,  but  with 
considerable  satisfaction  that  his  youth  was  not  spent 
in  a  New  England  village.  It  is  doubtful  whether 
more  disagreeable  people  were  ever  gathered  in  a 
single  novel  (outside  of  "  Wuthering  Heights  ")  than 
in  "Pembroke."  The  first  hundred  pages  of  the 
book  are  a  record  of  family  bickering  and  quarrels  in 
three  households — in  which  brothers  and  sisters,  and 
82 


mothers  and  fathers  are  arrayed  against  each  other  in 
the  name  of  the  Lord.  We  have  been  told  in  New 
England-made  histories  that  it  is  from  homes  like 
these  that  the  strong  men,  the  "  makers  of  the  Repub 
lic,"  in  politics,  literature,  and  art,  have  sprung. 

One  can  imagine  Colonel  Carter  saying,  after  read 
ing  "Pembroke,"  "By  gad,  sah,  we  may  not  be 
makahs  of  the  Republic,  sah,  but  we  know  how  to 
live  respectably,  affectionately,  and  honorably  with 
our  own  people  !  ' ' 


"DAVID    BALFOUR" 

IT  is  a  very  trying  test  of  the  growth  and  perform 
ance  of  a  writer  when  he  publishes  the  sequel  to 
a  great  success  after  a  long  interval.  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  set  up  such  a  standard  for  judgment  when 
he  published  the  sequel  to  "Kidnapped"  -the 
memoirs  and  adventures  of  "David  Balfour."  The 
critical  reader  may  hold  himself  in  this  attitude  of 
judgment  for  the  first  hundred  pages  of  "  David  Bal 
four.  ' '  For  that  space  he  will  admire  chiefly  the  ad 
mirable  technic  of  the  novel.  He  will  marvel  most 
of  all,  perhaps,  at  the  intellectual  dexterity  with  which 
Stevenson  put  himself,  body  and  soul,  into  the  Scot 
land  of  1751,  and  then  proceeded,  with  the  ease  of  an 
eighteenth-century  Scotchman,  to  write  four  or  five 
Scotch  dialects  in  the  same  chapter — Highland  and 
Lowland,  chief  and  peasant,  Fife  and  Lothian — each 
differing  from  the  other  by  some  gradations  of  pro 
nunciation,  some  words  and  phrases  peculiar  to  the 
class  or  clan.  The  finest  manifestation  of  this  ac 
complishment  is  the  ease  and  perfect  naturalness  with 
which  Balfour,  for  example,  changes  his  mode  of 
speech  to  suit  the  character  he  is  addressing — and, 
84 


little  by  little,  all  the  while  reveals  the  steps  of  his 
own  development,  from  an  awkward  village  boy  to  a 
man  of  the  world,  with  some  social  graces.  Whether 
or  not  this  linguistic  jugglery  was  the  fruit  of  a 
scholar's  knowledge  of  the  period,  or  a  feat  of  the 
imagination,  can  only  concern  one  or  two  learned 
Scots  at  the  most.  For  the  critical  reader  it  is 
enough  to  feel  that  Stevenson  did  a  very  difficult 
thing,  with  an  air  of  truth  and  reality  which  needed 
no  further  justification. 

After  the  first  hundred  pages  all  these  questions  of 
technic  and  literary  skill  are  swept  out  of  sight  by  the 
glamour  of  the  romance.  From  there  to  the  end  it  is 
Catriona  and  David,  Alan  Breck  and  James  More 
who  are  the  real  and  pertinent  things  to  you.  Catri 
ona  is  henceforth  one  of  the  charming  and  lovable 
women  you  are  glad  to  have  known.  She  refutes  for 
all  time  the  charge  that  the  author  could  not  create  a 
womanly  woman.  Her  charm  is  the  directness  and 
fidelity  of  her  affection ;  but  the  spice  is  her  nimble 
Scotch  temper,  which  flames  up  like  burning  heather 
in  a  drought,  and  then  glows  long  with  the  warmth 
of  it,  like  smouldering  peat.  "There's  just  the  two 
sets  of  weemenfolk,"  says  Alan  Breck,  "them  that 
would  sell  theer  coats  for  ye,  and  them  that  never  look 
the  road  ye're  on.  That's  a'  that  there  is  to  women." 
And  that's  a  big  part  of  Catriona,  but  not  all,  Alan 
my  braw  lad ;  there  is  an  amazing  amount  of  Scotch 
pride  in  her  which  makes  her  own  personal  inde 
pendence  (what  men  call  honor)  of  more  account  to 
85 


her  than  the  love  of  David.  She  would  not  have 
his  love  unless  it  came  to  her  without  a  shade  of  false 
motive. 

Alan  comes  nearer  all  the  truth  in  summing  up  the 
character  of  David  Balf our — "He's  no  very  bonnie, 
my  dear,  but  he's  leal  to  them  he  loves." 

The  tendency  of  recent  writing  has  been  to  put 
loyalty  to  an  abstract  principle  ahead  of  personal 
loyalty.  We  have  been  making  heroes  of  men  who 
renounce  family  and  friends  for  the  sake  of  a  creed. 
This  is,  no  doubt,  a  great  force  for  progress,  but  one 
must  confess  that  there  never  was  a  finer  cloak  for 
hypocrisy,  treachery,  and  selfishness  than  this  same 
"  loyalty  to  a  principle."  Oh,  the  friends  and  homes 
that  have  been  sacrificed  to  feed  the  vanity  of  it !  It's 
a  fine  thing  to  put  on  a  tombstone  that  a  man  was 
loyal  to  his  principles ;  but  in  his  heart  of  hearts  a 
decent  man  would  rather  have  it  written  of  himself, 
living  or  dead — "  He's  leal  to  them  he  loves." 


86 


THE   LITERARY   PARTITION   OF   SCOTLAND 


THE  LITERARY  PARTITION  OF  SCOTLAND 

IN  the  present  partition  of  Scotland  for  literary  pur 
poses  among  fiction  writers,  the  following  amicable 
allotment  of  territory  seems  to  have  been  agreed  upon  : 
Forfarshire  to  Barrie,  Inverness  and  Ross  to  William 
Black,  Fife  to  Annie  Swan  and  the  author  of  "  Barn- 
craig,"  Perthshire  to  Ian  Maclaren,  and  old  Galloway 
to  S.  R.  Crockett.  So  long  as  each  keeps  to  his  own 
territory  these  brethren  dwell  together  in  unity  and 
unstintedly  praise  each  other's  books.  Instead  of  the 
old  feuds  of  the  clans,  these  modern  chieftains  seem 
to  have  formed  a  Literary  Trust  for  Scotland  which 
runs  things  to  suit  itself  and  absorbs  the  bulk  of  the 
profits  in  the  business  of  making  marketable  tales.  As 
they  have  a  monopoly  of  the  brains  adapted  for  that 
kind  of  work,  there  is  no  particular  reason  why  they 
should  not  have  the  emoluments. 

But  some  of  these  days  a  venturesome  young  Scot, 
who  has  been  lighting  his  way  through  Edinburgh 
University  on  sixpence  a  day,  will  put  on  his  bon 
net  and  kilt,  gird  on  his  dagger  and  slip  a  skene-dhu 
into  his  stocking.  Then  he  will  sally  forth  into  the 
literary  territory  of  one  of  the  present  chieftains,  and 
89 


there  will  be  as  pretty  a  fight  in  the  literary  way  as 
has  been  seen  since  the  old  days  of  Christopher  North. 
In  the  meantime,  Americans  will  buy  unlimited 
quantities  of  the  books  of  chieftains  and  usurpers,  and, 
with  their  usual  indifference,  will  become  more  famil 
iar  with  the  traditions,  history,  and  dialects  of  a  coun 
try  three  thousand  miles  away  than  with  their  own 
States.  And  they  are  little  to  blame  for  it,  because 
many  of  our  own  writers,  as  soon  as  they  become  tol 
erably  adept  in  the  business,  are  apt  to  go  abroad  and 
spend  the  rest  of  their  days  "  discovering  "  European 
types  and  writing  about  them.  The  American  reader, 
with  his  usual  acuteness,  prefers  the  real  foreign  novel 
to  an  imitation  of  it  by  one  of  his  countrymen ;  and 
he  is  about  right  in  his  preference. 


90 


J.  M.  BARRIE 

JM.  BARRIE  is  one  of  the  group  of  Scots  who 
•  are  writing  so  much  of  the  good  poetry,  essays, 
and  fiction  which  come  from  over  the  sea.  Lang, 
MacDonald,  Black,  Buchanan  are  his  older  fellow- 
countrymen,  each  with  a  style  of  his  own — for  what 
ever  else  a  Scot  may  be  in  his  writings,  he  is  usually 
a  stylist.  He  is  rather  a  man  of  feeling,  of  enthusi 
asm,  than  of  remarkable  intellectual  culture — and  it 
is  feeling  that  gives  individuality  to  style. 

To  get  at  what  is  best  in  Barrie's  earlier  work  one 
must  read  ''A  Window  in  Thrums"  and  "  Auld 
Licht  Idylls  " — a  series  of  sketches,  lightly  caught  to 
gether  by  the  reappearance  of  the  same  characters 
from  time  to  time,  and  all  of  them  centred  in  the 
Scotch  village  of  Thrums — "a.  handful  of  houses 
jumbled  together  in  a  cup,"  where  twenty  years  ago 
nearly  every  man  was  a  weaver,  working  out  his  life 
over  a  handloom.  They  were  a  solemn  people  to 
whom  the  most  serious  thing  in  life  was  the  Kirk, 
and  the  only  social  division,  the  impassable  moral 
barriers  that  divided  Auld  Lichts  from  Free  Kirks 
and  U.  Ps. 


The  quality  which  Mr.  Barrie  puts  into  his  sketches 
of  this  quaint  old  village  life  is  entire  absorption  in 
it.  For  him  and  for  his  reader  there  is  no  other 
place,  no  other  standard  of  judgment  than  Thrums. 
It  is  his  aloofness  from  any  larger  interests  that  makes 
Thrums  so  real.  You  are  living  with  him  in  the  house 
at  the  top  of  the  brae  and  see  the  world  through  Jess's 
window.  It  is  a  gray  world,  narrow  and  sad  and 
filled  with  poverty.  But  there  is  a  certain  moral  ele 
vation  about  the  people,  a  brave  attitude  toward  the 
worst  that  life  can  bring,  which  gives  distinction  to 
them.  Poverty  or  occupation  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  essential  refinement  of  a  family  like  Jess  and 
Hendry  and  Leeby.  Their  heart-breaking  affection 
for  each  other,  which  conceals  itself  behind  a  stolid 
manner,  their  consideration  in  little  things,  their  de 
termination  to  endure  cheerfully — these  are  the  qual 
ities  which  would  make  any  station  in  life  digni 
fied. 

It  would  be  hard  to  choose  between  the  pathos  and 
humor  of  these  books — for  each  is  so  simple,  direct, 
and  natural.  They  chase  each  other  from  page  to 
page,  treading  on  each  other's  heels.  You  are  never 
conscious  that  the  author  is  playing  with  your  feelings 
—for  all  that  happens  is  so  necessary. 

This  does  not  imply  that  the  sketches  are  uniformly 
successful;  for  they  may  be  colorless  like  "Davit 
Lunan's  Political  Reminiscences,"  or,  perhaps,  too 
farcical,  like  the  "  Auld  Lichts  in  Arms." 

But  at  their  worst,  the  charm  of  the  homely  style, 
92 


with  its  Gaelic  idioms  giving  it  both  strength  and  mel 
ody,  will  carry  the  reader  through  them  with  delight. 

Barrie's  "  My  Lady  Nicotine  "  is  a  book  that  sug 
gests  but  is  very  unlike  "  The  Reveries  of  a  Bach 
elor.  ' '  The  former  is  urban  ;  the  latter  is  provincial. 
A  brier  pipe  filled  with  Arcadia  Mixture  starts  the 
reveries  in  the  one  ;  a  hearth  fire,  in  the  other. 

The  five  bachelors  in  "  My  Lady  Nicotine  "  seem 
to  be  utterly  dissimilar  in  tastes  and  feelings — and 
have  only  one  bond  of  union,  their  common  love  for 
the  famous  Arcadia  Mixture.  The  solemnity  with 
which  they  treat  their  pipes  ;  their  assured  superiority 
to  everybody  outside  of  the  circle  which  knows  and  ap 
preciates  that  mysterious  brand  of  tobacco  ;  the  sen 
timental  selfishness  of  their  bachelor  existence,  and 
the  delicate  humor  with  which  the  quiet  episodes  are 
narrated — these  are  some  of  the  charming  qualities  of 
the  book. 

But  the  crowning  humor  of  it  is  that  the  story  is 
told  by  one  of  their  number,  who  boldly  announces  in 
the  first  chapter  that  he  has  married,  and  that  his  wife 
has  won  him  from  his  pipe  and  his  comrades.  He  cheap 
ly  moralizes  on  their  enslavement,  and  then  in  reveries 
calls  up  the  happy  days  when  he  smoked  with  them. 

The  closing  chapter  is  a  most  subtile  piece  of  writ 
ing.  The  narrator  praises  his  constancy  to  his  prom 
ise  never  to  smoke  again,  and  adds:  "I  have  not 
even  any  craving  for  the  Arcadia  now,  though  it  is  a 
tobacco  that  should  only  be  smoked  by  our  greatest 
93 


men."  Then  he  confesses  that  when  his  wife  is 
asleep  and  all  the  house  is  still,  he  sits  with  his  empty 
brier  in  his  mouth,  and  listens  to  the  taps  of  a  pipe  in 
the  hands  of  a  smoker  (whom  he  has  never  seen)  on 
the  other  side  of  the  wall.  "  When  the  man  through 
the  wall  lights  up  I  put  my  cold  pipe  in  my  mouth 
and  we  have  a  quiet  hour  together. ' ' 

Same's  most  ambitious  work  is,  of  course,  his 
novel,  "  The  Little  Minister."  The  style  is  flexible, 
penetrating,  rough  but  melodious — the  product  of  an 
early  saturation  with  Burns,  the  Bible,  and  Rous's 
version  of  the  Psalms.  There  are  in  it  also  touches 
of  contemporary  literary  godfathers,  for  you  may 
catch  a  trace  of  Stevenson  with  his  "  love  of  lovely 
words  "  in  Barrie's  choice  of  names  like  Windyghoul 
and  Glen  Quharity ;  and  from  no  other  man  than 
George  Meredith  could  he  have  learned  so  well  the 
art  of  mingling  an  intense  emotional  crisis  with  what 
is  unusual  and  uncanny  in  nature — like  the  great  rain 
storm  through  which  the  culmination  of  this  story 
moves.  You  are  made  to  see  the  Windyghoul  and 
the  Glen  through  the  emotions  of  the  actors  in  the 
drama,  and  not  as  an  artist  sees  a  landscape  with  an 
eye  for  color  and  detail  and  composition. 

In  the  way  of  character  also  you  catch  a  hint  of 
Meredith's  methods ;  you  inevitably  think  of  Kiomi, 
the  gypsy  girl,  in  "  Harry  Richmond,"  when  The 
Egyptian  of  this  story  appears.  But  these  things  are 
the  faintest  echoes — for  of  all  men  Barrie  is  original. 
94 


His  Tammas  WJiamond  is  a  creation  who  might  be 
admitted  to  illustrious  companionship  with  the  great 
Mulvaney — and  while  Mulvaney  would  brag  of  the 
time  when  he  was  "  a  sergeant  and  a  divil  of  a  man," 
Whamondwv\&  wrap  himself  up  in  the  "  mantle  of 
chief  elder  o'  the  Kirk." 

It  is  more  in  the  minor  characters  than  the  prin 
cipals  that  the  quality  of  the  story  is  shown.  You 
are  made  to  know  these  people,  who  come  and  go 
without  evident  reason,  as  you  would  know  them  if 
you  lived  in  the  village  of  Thrums  and  saw  them  every 
Sabbath  in  the  Auld  Licht  Kirk.  You  begin  to  judge 
the  Little  Minister  by  their  standard,  and  develop  a 
small  prejudice  against  the  U.  Ps.  and  the  Free  Kirk. 

What  you  will  oftenest  recall  with  pleasure  is  the 
delicious  humor  of  certain  episodes  —  like  Waster 
Lunny  frantically  searching  for  the  book  of  Ezra ;  or 
piper  Campbeir s  mighty  wrath  when  he  was  ordered 
by  the  Earl  to  play  the  "  Bonny  House  o'  Airlie  " — 
the  tune  which  the  Ogilvys  used  to  hurl  at  the  clan 
Campbell ;  or  The  Egvptiarf s  first  meeting  with  the 
Little  Minister,  and  how  she  outwitted  him. 

Indeed  the  book  must  be  judged  rather  as  a  series  of 
character  sketches  (like  "A  Window  in  Thrums" 
and  the  "Auld  Licht  Idylls")  than  as  a  full-fledged 
novel.  It  is  a  charming  piece  of  work,  interesting 
from  first  to  last,  but  lacking  in  unity.  And  there 
is  the  gentle  spirit  of  Margaret  which  pervades  the 
book — "one  whose  nature  was  not  complex,  but 
most  simple,  as  if  God  had  told  her  only  to  be  good," 
95 


o 


S.  R.  CROCKETT 

F  all  the  morbid  novels  that  are  now  being  writ 
ten  and  read  there  is  not  a  single  one  coming 
from  this  group  of  clever  Scotchmen.  Therefore 
you  may  read  "The  Raiders/'  by  S.  R.  Crockett, 
with  confidence  that  you  will  not  think  worse  of  your 
race  when  you  have  finished  it.  It  is  like  a  strong, 
fresh  breeze  from  the  heathery  hills,  with  the  bracing 
touch  of  salt  water  clinging  to  it.  There  is  a  deal  of 
blood  and  fighting  in  it — and  you  can  almost  take  it 
as  an  axiom  that  the  more  pious  the  origin  of  a  Scotch 
writer  the  more  gore  will  you  find  in  his  novels.  It 
is  probable  that  the  long  chapters  from  the  Old  Tes 
tament  committed  to  memory  in  boyhood  give  their 
minds  a  turn  toward  fighting  and  conflict.  And 
then,  too,  there  is  atavism  to  account  for  it — the 
reappearance  in  the  third  or  fourth  generation  of  the 
old  ways,  when  the  clans  chased  each  other  like 
hounds  and  only  the  strong  men  survived.  It  was 
very  brutal  no  doubt,  but,  physiologically  speaking, 
it  was  a  good  way  to  rid  a  whole  race  of  weaklings. 

A  very  good  argument  could  be  made  by  any  man 
(not  a  Scotchman)  to  prove   that    there   is   nothing 
elevating  in  literature  that  devotes  itself  to  the  brutal 
96 


struggles  of  strong  men  with  each  other ;  that  a 
prize-fight  is  a  prize-fight,  whether  it  is  described 
by  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  or  the  New  York  World. 
There  is  no  doubt  a  touch  of  barbarism  in  it,  but 
it  stirs  your  blood  in  the  right  way.  After  you  have 
read  the  fight  on  the  Brig  of  Dee  in  "  The  Raiders," 
you'll  have  no  stomach  for  "  The  Yellow  Aster  "  or 
"  Dodo."  Between  barbarism  and  a  jaundiced  soul, 
the  sane  man  will  choose  barbarism  every  time. 

All  of  which  does  not  admit,  for  an  instant,  that 
"  The  Raiders  "  is  barbaric.  It  is  really  elevated  in 
sentiment  and  motive.  The  love  of  the  Laird  of 
Rathan  and  May  Mischief  is  poetic,  and  strong  as 
well.  The  steadfastness  of  Silver  Sand  is  real  hero 
ism.  And  so  throughout  the  book,  the  sentiments 
and  motives  are  vigorous  and  full  of  health.  It  is 
easy  to  trace  the  literary  ancestry  of  the  book.  The 
author  himself  has  frankly  paid  homage  to  Stevenson. 
A  clever  man  recently  said  that  "  The  Raiders  "  was 
the  offspring  of  Alan  Brcck  and  Lorna  Doone,  which 
surely  indicates  its  salient  qualities.  At  the  same 
time  it  sets  the  standard  of  judgment  very  high,  and 
the  story  falls  short  in  some  particulars.  For  one 
thing,  the  tale  often  flounders  around  in  pages  of 
wordy  descriptions  which  lead  to  nothing. 

The  archaisms  have  something  to  do  with  this 
effect.  Not  only  is  it  Scotch,  and  Galloway  Scotch 
at  that,  but  it  is  the  language  of  the  early  part  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  The  author  has  evidently  spared 
no  pains  to  be  correct  in  his  dialect.  He  must  be 
97 


credited  with  a  considerable  intellectual  accomplish 
ment,  but  the  reader  who  is  not  a  philologist  will  long 
for  less  of  the  archaic  and  more  good  English. 

But  with  it  all  one's  fancy  is  refreshed  by  reading 
the  story,  and  there  is  a  touch  of  color  left  in  one's 
memory  that  was  never  there  before. 

Another  of  Mr.  Crockett's  novels,  "Mad  Sir 
Uchtred  of  the  Hills,"  keeps  close  to  the  Galloway 
hills  and  the  days  of  the  Covenanters. 

It  isn't  a  pleasant  tale,  and  no  amount  of  archaic 
Scotch,  with  a  sprinkling  of  psalm-singing  and  long 
prayers,  can  seriously  interest  a  reader  in  a  mad,  un 
kempt,  naked,  and  dirty  old  chief  who  is  playing  Ne 
buchadnezzar  on  the  hills,  while  his  brother  makes 
love  to  his  wife  at  home. 

The  one  touch  of  beauty  in  the  story  is  the  faithful 
Philippa  with  her  children — all  of  them  shadowy 
sketches,  leaving  the  tale  without  that  leaven  of  idyllic 
love  which  softened  the  harshness  of  "  The  Raiders." 

The  reaction  from  "  prettiness  "  in  writing  is  a 
good  thing  ;  but  this  is  not  a  barbarous  age,  and  a 
great  deal  can  be  said  for  the  doctrine  of  the  late 
Walter  Pater  as  to  the  supremacy  of  beauty  in  life  and 
art.  Surely  it  ought  to  count  for  a  good  deal  in  the 
literary  art  ! 

It  is  probable  that  some   of  the   success  of  Mr. 
Crockett   is  due  to  the  fact  that  his  books  and  fa 
vorite  characters  do  not  offend  against  the  accepted 
standards  of  morality  as  handed  down  from  genera- 
98 


tion  to  generation  of  decent  people.  Moreover,  they 
actually  approve  of  these  standards  heartily,  and 
bring  to  severe  punishment  those  who  go  against 
them.  Such  an  attitude  in  a  fiction-writer  would  not 
have  attracted  attention  a  few  years  ago — because  it 
was  taken  for  granted  that  he  approved  of  such  things 
before  he  went  into  the  business. 

But  some  daring  Englishman  (probably  George 
Moore,  first  of  all),  took  the  other  tack,  achieved 
notoriety,  and,  for  three  or  four  years  since,  the  man 
or  woman  who  wrote  a  book  to  upset  some  accepted 
standard  was  pretty  sure  of  success. 

In  a  literary  period  pretty  generally  occupied  with 
kicking  over  the  traces,  a  good,  steady-going  Scotch 
dominie,  with  considerable  of  the  preacher's  knack 
at  parables,  has  achieved  a  success  which  seems  out  of 
proportion  to  his  literary  output.  He  has  written, 
as  we  have  said,  one  book  of  force  and  originality — 
"The  Raiders" — and  three  or  four  other  studies  of 
Galloway  character  that  are  put  into  attractive  Eng 
lish  interlarded  with  barbaric  Scotch  dialect.  But 
there  is  nothing  in  all  this  to  justify  the  opinion  that 
the  sacred  fire  that  went  out  in  Samoa  is  rekindled 
upon  his  hearth. 

Indeed,  his  recent  story,  "  The  Play  Actress,"  is  a 
ludicrous  illustration  of  what  may  result  from  a  pro 
vincial  minister's  attempting  to  prove  that  he  is  a 
literary  man  of  broad  equipment,  "  in  touch  with  the 
world,"  by  writing  a  story  in  which  glimpses  are  given 
of  the  wickedness  of  London. 
99 


IAN  MACLAREN 

RNEW  Scotch  writer  has  come  out  of  Perthshire 
to  enter  the  quaint  town  of  Drumtochty  into 
competition  with  Thrums  as  a  centre  of  literary  in 
terest.  In  « '  Beside  the  Bonnie  Brier  Bush  ' '  Ian 
Maclaren  has  done  some  very  good  writing  of  the 
simple,  direct  sort  that  comes  natural  to  Scotchmen. 
The  old,  quaint  types  are  also  in  its  pages — men  and 
women  with  hard,  strong  faces,  under  which  are  play 
ing  deep  feeling  and  imagination.  They  are  good 
people  to  know  in  either  books  or  real  life,  though 
they  are  often  rather  trying  (in  both  places),  by  reason 
of  their  tremendous  respect  for  their  own  personality 
and  persistent  undervaluing  of  the  personality  of  al 
ien  people.  One  may  sincerely  praise  Mr.  Maclaren 
for  his  very  genuine  grasp  of  the  things  that  make 
character  in  simple  folks,  and  for  the  strong,  expres 
sive  English  in  which  he  sets  down  his  impressions. 
He  shows  a  true  sense  of  the  literary  value  of  common 
things  in  a  lack  of  exaggeration  and  in  utter  oblivi- 
ousness  to  any  other  standard  of  life  or  manners  than 
that  of  Drumtochty.  One  is  inclined  to  think  that 
100 


what  he  imagines  to  be  real  pathos  is  sometimes  rather 
forced,  and  his  heroism,  a  kind  of  inevitable  obstinacy. 
But  the  sketch  of  the  village  doctor  is  of  great  force 
and  naturalness.  It  is  one  of  the  best  stories  of  Scotch 
humble  life  of  recent  years. 


101 


FRIENDS  IN  ARCADY 


CHARLES   DANA   GIBSON 

FOR  a  good  many  years  the  writer  has  furnished 
articles  to  be  set  in  type  and  used  as  frames 
around  the  drawings  of  C.  D.  Gibson.  When  he 
has  constructed  a  paragraph  that  filled  his  heart  with 
joy  and  vanity,  it  has  been  his  luck  to  open  next 
week's  Life  and  find  that  a  Gibson  Girl  had  put  her 
dainty  foot  right  through  the  middle  of  it.  There 
has  been  no  subject  in  contemporary  literature  upon 
which  the  present  writer  has  attempted  to  shed  light 
that  the  Gibson  Girl  has  not  intruded  some  part  of  her 
anatomy  or  finery  into  it.  She  has  done  it  very  grace 
fully  and  with  a  ravishing  smile;  but  even  that  won't 
smooth  out  the  creases  in  a  writer's  vanity  when  he 
finds  his  choicest  sentences  cut  in  two  by  a  picture. 

At  last  a  day  of  reckoning  and  revenge  has  arrived. 
Mine  enemy  has  published  a  book — "  Drawings  by 
Charles  Dana  Gibson." 

The  trouble  with  revenge  for  which  one  has  waited 
a  long  time  is  that  it  isn't  sweet.  The  edge  is  off 
the  grievance,  and  one  has  endured  it  so  long  that  it 
takes  the  guise  of  a  blessing.  So  it  happens  that  I 
have  come  to  look  upon  the  Gibson  Girl  as  my  friend. 
I  am  positive  that  she  has  broken  up  more  stupid 


paragraphs  than  bright  ones — for  all  of  which  I  am 
duly  thankful. 

Indeed,  the  Gibson  Girl,  as  she  appears  in  this 
volume,  is  a  charmer  to  melt  the  heart  of  any  crusty 
bachelor.  Even  my  friend  the  cynical  Adrian  says 
that  she  is  "no  clothes'  horse."  She  is  dressed  a  la 
mode  to  be  sure,  but  she  has  a  pair  of  shoulders  under 
her  coat  that  can  drive  an  oar  through  the  water  or 
keep  a  hunter  down  to  his  work.  And  her  neck  rises 
out  of  her  gown  as  though  it  were  attached  to  some 
thing  substantial.  Then  she  looks  square  at  you  with 
intelligent  eyes  that  hide  a  touch  of  mischief  lurking 
in  their  corners.  She  is  healthy  and  brave  and  inde 
pendent  and  well-bred  ;  she  can  dance  as  well  as  she 
can  run  a  Boys'  Club,  and  she  knows  as  much  about 
golf  as  French  and  German.  She  goes  to  church  on 
Sundays,  recites  the  Ten  Commandments,  and  reads 
Life  every  Tuesday.  That  is  the  Girl  as  I  know 
her.  She  is  probably  different  to  you.  At  any  rate 
you  will  find  her  somewhere  in  this  volume.  You 
can't  miss  it;  if  you  own  this  book  you'll  have  a 
picture  of  your  ideal  girl. 

For  Gibson  has  a  way  of  adopting  all  nice  girls 
into  his  family.  You  don't  realize  what  a  large  fam 
ily  he  has  until  you  get  them  all  together  in  this 
book.  There  is  a  proud  and  haughty  beauty  among 
them  that  only  a  millionaire,  with  a  superb  education 
in  addition  to  his  bank  account,  would  dare  propose 
to.  And  then  there  is  a  pleasant -faced,  black-eyed 
fascinator,  who  would  not  mind  living  in  a  cheap 
106 


house  in  the  suburbs  if  she  really  loved  a  man.  She 
would  make  the  man  believe  that  he  owned  a  mag 
nificent  villa,  and  was  the  happiest  fellow  in  New  Jersey. 

Mr.  Gibson  has  a  great  responsibility  on  his  shoul 
ders,  and  if  he  once  fully  realizes  it,  it  will  keep  him 
awake  nights.  I  wonder  if  he  knows  that  there  are 
thousands  of  American  girls,  from  Oshkosh  to  Key 
West,  who  are  trying  to  live  up  to  the  standard  of 
his  girls.  You  can  always  tell  when  a  girl  is  taking 
the  Gibson  Cure  by  the  way  she  fixes  her  hair.  I've 
watched  them  go  through  the  whole  scale  from 
Psyche  knots,  to  Pompadour,  to  Bath  Buns,  to  side 
waves  with  a  bewitching  part  in  the  middle. 

Then,  too,  he  has  set  a  most  adorable  fashion  in 
widows.  I  know  sane,  intelligent  bachelors  who 
prefer  the  Gibson  Widow  to  the  Girl.  The  trouble 
with  the  Widow  is  that  she  is  so  transitory.  You  are 
dead  certain  that  she  is  just  waiting  to  be  asked,  and 
that  you  are  the  man  to  ask  her. 

Now  a  real  Art  Critic  would  not  tell  you  about 
the  girls  and  the  widows  in  Gibson's  book,  but  would 
give  you  a  lot  of  information  about  the  wonderful 
technic,  the  simplicity  of  line,  the  grace  of  compo 
sition,  the  freedom,  the  directness,  etc.  I've  heard 
men  say  who  know  (and  real  critics  all  know),  that 
Gibson  has  all  of  those  things,  and  a  good  many 
more.  And  I  believe  he  has ;  but  he  does  not  make 
much  fuss  about  them.  He  goes  right  along  making 
better  and  better  pictures,  working  with  energy  and 
intelligence — and  the  other  fellows  do  the  talking. 
107 


A,  B.  FROST 

I  ONCE  heard  the  editor  of  a  humorous  paper  say 
that  A.  B.  Frost  was  the  best  caricaturist  in 
America,  and  that  he  often  picked  up  his  series  of 
sketches  called  "The  Humane  Man  and  the  Bull 
Calf ' '  and  looked  them  over  in  order  to  have  a  good 
laugh.  Now  there  must  be  something  in  the  work 
of  a  man  who  can  make  the  editor  of  a  humorous 
paper  laugh  outside  of  business  hours.  Hopkinson 
Smith,  in  trying  to  explain  psychologically  why  we 
laugh  at  Mr.  Frost's  caricatures,  says  that  "no  man 
laughs  effectively  with  pen  or  brush  who  does  not 
laugh  with  his  own  soul  first" — thus  implying  that, 
among  his  other  admirable  possessions,  Frost  owns  a 
laughing  soul.  That  seems  like  a  good  explanation, 
but,  as  I  don't  know  anything  about  Mr.  Frost's 
soul,  I  asked  him  about  it,  and  he  replied  that  "  Bun- 
ner's  article  about  me  in  Harper 's  Magazine,  for  Oc 
tober,  1892,  contains  all  the  facts."  I  looked  it  up 
and  found  that  Mr.  Bunner  believed  that  "  honesty  " 
was  the  principal  characteristic  of  Frost's  art — that 
it  is  honest  clear  through,  including  its  "American 
atmosphere."  I  always  suspected  that  Mr.  Frost 
108 


was  honest,  and  I'm  glad  to  find  it  confirmed  by  one 
of  his  friends — but  somehow  that  does  not  help  to 
explain  why  we  laugh  at  his  pictures.  I've  known 
some  very  good  men  who  laughed  at  pictures  made 
by  rogues. 

It's  a  very  good  start,  though,  toward  our  under 
standing  of  Mr.  Frost  to  know  that  he  is  "  honest  " 
and  has  a  "  laughing  soul,"  but  I  suspected  that  his 
models  had  something  to  do  with  the  real  funniness 
of  his  pictures,  and  I  asked  him  about  it. 

"I  use  one  model  for  all  my  men,"  he  replied. 
' '  I  rarely  have  more  than  one  model  for  old  and 
young,  black  or  white.  If  I  could  get  a  model  for 
every  figure  I  draw  I  would  do  so,  but  it  is  out  of  the 
question  with  such  rapid  work  as  illustration.  I 
might  mention  that  there  is  a  singular  peculiarity 
about  the  women ;  all  the  handsome  ones  are  stupid 
and  can't  put  an  idea  into  a  pose,  and  all  the  bright 
ones  who  can  and  will  pose  and  help  your  work  are 
decidedly  plain  both  as  to  face  and  figure.  I  have 
never  been  able  to  get  much  satisfaction  out  of  the 
surrounding  rural  population  as  models.  I  have  tried 
the  local  picturesque  old  men,  with  the  result  of  hav 
ing  them  go  to  sleep  when  I  gave  them  a  comfortable 
pose,  and  having  them  wriggle  all  the  time  when  I 
didn't.  The  local  small  boy  is  better,  but  he  is  al 
ways  sent  in  his  Sunday  clothes,  in  which  he  is  far 
from  picturesque." 

As  a  great  deal  of  Mr.  Frost's  work  is  done  for  the 
magazines  about  six  months  before  the  date  of  publi- 
109 


cation,  this  question  of  models  is  still  further  com 
plicated  with  the  necessity  of  getting  the  honest 
American  atmospheric  effect  that  Mr.  Bunner  praises. 
One  August,  when  the  thermometer  stood  about  90°, 
even  on  the  hills  of  Madison,  N.  J.,  where  Mr.  Frost 
lives,  he  had  a  fine  run  of  work  for  the  Christmas  mag 
azines  that  demanded  night  snow-scenes  for  a  steady 
background.  So  for  several  weeks  the  artist  used  to 
retire  to  his  studio,  darken  the  windows,  and  study 
night  effects  in  a  stifling  atmosphere.  It  is  no  won 
der  that  the  rural  population  of  Morris  County  are  a 
trifle  restless  and  unsatisfactory  as  models. 

Every  one  knows  how  realistic  are  the  animals  in 
Frost's  pictures,  with  infinite  variety  in  pose  and  ex 
pression — revealing  many  degrees  of  emotion,  as  those 
will  remember  who  have  seen  the  series  known  as 
"  Violet's  Experience."  He  has  confessed  the  secret 
of  this  success:  "I  have  a  very  fat  white  bull-dog 
who  has  learned  to  pose.  My  man  holds  him  for  a 
while  till  he  is  settled  down,  and  then  he  seems  to 
know  what  I  want  and  will  keep  his  position  for  a 
long  time,  looking  beseechingly  at  me  every  now  and 
then.  When  I  am  through  and  give  him  the  word  he 
will  bounce  about  and  bark  delightedly,  and  then  go 
out  as  soon  as  possible.  One  pose  is  enough  for  him. ' ' 

Mr.  Frost  does  not  say  that  the  white  bull- dog 
poses  for  the  whole  animal  kingdom,  just  as  the  one 
man  poses  for  all  humanity,  but  it  is  a  fair  inference, 
and  certainly  helps  to  confirm  the  "  laughing-soul" 
theory  of  Mr.  Smith. 

no 


Another  thing  which  makes  Mr.  Frost's  soul  laugh 
is  when  people  solemnly  ask  him,  "  Do  you  read  the 
story  you  are  illustrating  ?  "  "I  wonder  whether  they 
think  I  know  it  by  intuition,"  he  said  to  a  friend, 
"  or  whether  I  sit  up  nights  with  the  author  and  have 
him  tell  me." 

As  Mr.  Frost  is  very  fond  of  the  country  and  of 
animals,  it  is  natural  that  he  should  have  taken  re 
cently  to  doing  sporting  pictures,  and  has  a  number 
of  subjects  which  he  is  working  up.  He  is  person 
ally  fond  of  shooting,  but  gets  little  time  to  go  long 
distances  from  home  where  game  abounds.  On  those 
rare  occasions  when  he  combines  sketching  with  his 
shooting;  trips  he  meets  with  amusing,  though  often 
annoying  experiences,  many  of  which  have  found 
their  way  into  his  humorous  sketches.  "They  al 
ways  speak  of  a  landscape  as  <  a  scenery,'  and  tell 
you  where  there  are  much  better  'sceneries,'"  he 
says.  One  old  boy  came  every  day  to  watch  him  as 
he  was  painting  a  study  of  some  cherry-trees,  and 
professed  a  great  love  for  pictures  and  praised  Frost's 
work  highly.  After  a  long  harangue  about  art  and 
his  fondness  for  it,  the  old  man  said  one  day  :  "Do 
you  know,  if  had  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  I  be 
lieve  I'd  be  durn  fool  enough  to  buy  some  of  them 
things." 

"On  another  occasion,"   says  Mr.  Frost,  "I  was 

trying  to  paint  a  sunset,  and,  having  made  a  failure 

of  my  sketch,  I  scraped  it  off  the  canvas  and  told  a 

farmer  who  had  been  watching  me  for  some  time  that 

in 


I  had  not  worked  quick  enough  to  get  the  effect. 
After  some  consideration  he  replied,  '  Wall,  why  don't 
two  or  three  of  yez  go  at  it  at  onct  ?  '  " 

One  reason  why  Mr.  Frost's  pictures  are  always 
humanly  interesting  and  fresh  in  subject  and  idea  is 
that  not  only  does  he  work  steadily  and  very  hard, 
but  he  manages  to  get  his  fun  along  with  his  work. 
That  means  that  his  art  and  his  life  are  thoroughly 
united,  and  he  never  will  have  regrets  that  in  follow 
ing  art  he  perhaps  missed  life,  or  in  living  happily  he 
perhaps  missed  art.  Work  has  been  his  normal  con 
dition  from  the  day  when,  fifteen  years  old,  he  went 
into  the  employ  of  an  engraver  in  Philadelphia  and  be 
gan  to  learn  the  art  by  running  errands.  In  less  than 
a  year  he  took  up  lithography,  and  worked  at  it  for  five 
or  six  years.  Mr.  Frost  was  fortunate  in  having  for 
a  friend  William  J.  Clarke,  a  brother  of  the  humorist 
who  wrote  under  the  name  "  Max  Adeler,"  and  he 
insisted  that  Frost  should  illustrate  his  brother's  book, 
"  Out  of  the  Hurly-Burly,"  which  he  did  to  the 
delight  of  the  author  and  the  public.  Mr.  Bunner 
says  they  are  very  bad  wood-cuts,  "  that  look  as  if 
they  were  carved  with  a  penknife"  (which  was  not 
Frost's  fault),  but  I  remember  laughing  over  them 
many  an  evening  when  I  was  a  boy — and  all  the 
other  boys  did  likewise.  That  was  the  beginning  of 
Frost's  career  as  an  illustrator,  which  soon  brought 
him  to  New  York  to  work  on  the  Graphic ;  and  in 
1876  he  joined  Abbey,  Reinhart,  and  Alexander  at 
Harper's.  He  had  taken  drawing  lessons  at  the  Phil- 

112 


adelphia  Academy  of  Fine  Arts  in  the  evenings,  but 
in  1877  decided  to  get  a  more  thorough  training  by 
going  to  England.  In  a  year  he  returned  to  the 
United  States,  and  settled  down  to  steady  work  near 
Philadelphia,  where  he  was  married  in  1883. 

Mr.  Frost  makes  his  home  on  the  top  of  a  hill 
near  Madison,  where  the  "sceneries"  are  a  good 
crop,  raised  on  a  farm  of  about  one  hundred  and 
forty  acres,  with  a  house  in  the  middle  of  it  that  has 
big  pillars  along  the  front. 

Mr.  Frank  R.  Stockton  is  a  neighbor  of  Mr.  Frost's. 
He  also  is  a  farmer  when  he  is  not  trying  to  solve  the 
riddle  of  "The  Lady  or  the  Tiger?"  If  you  ask 
Mr.  Stockton  about  Frost  he'll  tell  you  that  Frost  is 
one  of  the  best  fellows  and  best  artists  in  the  world — 
but  no  farmer.  "Why,  he  tried  to  sell  me  what  he 
called  a  first-class  horse  last  summer,  and  you  could 
hear  his  joints  rattle  when  he  walked.  Besides  he  is 
no  judge  of  cows. ' ' 

If  you  ask  Frost  about  Stockton  he'll  tell  you  that 
he  is  the  best  of  neighbors  and  writes  boss  stories — 
"but  he's  no  farmer.  He  offered  to  sell  me  one  of 
his  first-class  cows,  and  I  had  to  ask  him  whether  a 
set  of  false  teeth  went  with  the  cow,  before  he  saw 
that  I  would  not  buy  her.  Besides,  Stockton  is  no 
judge  of  horses." 

And  this  is  the  end  of  the  chapter,  and  nothing  has 
been  said  about  the  large  amount  of  admirable  work 
on  which  Mr.  Frost's  great  reputation  as  an  illustrator 
is  built.  But  everybody  knows  about  that,  for  every- 


body  has  seen  his  pictures  in  Stockton's  "  Rudder 
Grange,"  Lewis  Carroll's  "  Phantasmagoria,"  Octave 
Thanet's  "Stories  of  a  Western  Town,"  Munkit- 
trick's  "  Farming,"  Btmner's  "  Story  of  a  New  York 
House,"  and  Frost's  own  books  "Stuff  and  Non 
sense  "and  "  The  Bull  Calf  and  Other  Tales."  If 
you  say  nice  things  about  his  illustrations  to  him  he 
will  hear  you  patiently,  and  then  quizzically  reply  : 
"Yes,  but  like  every  other  illustrator  under  the  sun, 
I  want  to  be  a  painter. ' ' 


F.  MARION  CRAWFORD 

THERE  is  no  need  to  localize  this  conversation 
with  F.  Marion  Crawford,  for  he  is  equally  at 
home  in  a  dozen  great  cities  of  the  world.  The 
readers  of  his  books  do  not  need  any  particular  back 
ground  to  explain  the  man  ;  he  is  a  thorough  cosmo 
polite.  But  personally  I  have  always  thought  of  Mr. 
Crawford  as  working  in  a  grotto  under  the  cliffs  of 
Sorrento,  with  the  flashing  waters  of  the  bay  shining 
through  the  arched  opening,  and  the  little  waves 
playing  on  the  white  sand,  almost  at  his  feet.  There 
I  have  often  imagined  him  sitting  before  a  little 
square  and  much-worn  table  of  pine,  with  nothing  on 
it  but  reams  of  paper  and  a  bottle  of  ink,  and  on  one 
corner,  near  his  hand,  a  teapot,  under  which  the  pale 
blue  flame  is  always  burning.  I  have  pictured  him 
there,  day  after  day,  drinking  unnumbered  cups  of 
tea,  and  summoning  out  of  the  dark  recesses  of  the 
grotto  the  strange  and  romantic  company  who  are  his 
familiars  —  Paul  Patoff,  Dr.  Claudius,  Saracinesca, 
Gouache,  Mr.  Isaacs,  Ram  Lai,  Marzio,  Zoroaster. 
They  spring  from  the  darkness,  talk  with  him  awhile, 
disappear  and  reappear,  forming  dramatic  groups  and 


doing  daring  deeds.  And,  while  they  come  and  go, 
he  is  always  writing,  writing,  imperturbably  writing, 
even  when  talking  with  them.  I  do  not  know  where 
I  first  got  this  idea,  but  I  think  I  can  trace  it  to  a 
chapter  in  "  To  Leeward  "  and  a  chance  newspaper 
paragraph.  At  any  rate,  I  have  been  a  firm  believer 
in  that  grotto  for  many  years,  and  I  want  to  continue 
to  believe  in  it.  Since  I  have  known  Mr.  Crawford 
personally,  I  have  carefully  avoided  asking  him  about 
it,  for  I  don't  want  to  destroy  the  illusion,  if  it  is 
one,  and  I  don't  believe  it  is  an  illusion.  With 
each  new  novel  of  his  that  I  have  read,  I  have  seen 
the  grotto  grow  a  little  larger,  the  darkness  become 
more  populous.  I  used  to  think  that  on  some  sunny 
day  I  should  be  rowed  across  the  bay  of  Sorrento 
(perhaps  by  one  of  the  "  Children  of  the  King  "), 
and  should  be  landed  from  the  little  boat  at  the  very 
mouth  of  the  cave ;  and  then  I  should  introduce  my 
self  to  Mr.  Crawford,  and  be  asked  to  have  a  cup  of 
tea  and  a  smoke.  When  we  had  talked  awhile,  I 
hoped  he  would  summon  his  familiars  from  the  dark 
ness  to  smoke  and  talk  with  us.  That  is  where  and 
how  this  conversation  should  have  taken  place. 

But  there  are  some  things  that  even  a  romantic 
novelist  cannot  do,  though  Thackeray  said  that  "  any 
thing  you  like  happens  in  Fable-land."  So  we  were 
compelled  to  talk  in  a  room,  in  the  heart  of  New 
York,  which  had  little  in  it  except  books,  and  a  big 
chair,  and  a  blaze  of  cannel-coal  in  the  grate.  If 
you  fill  the  big  chair  with  Mr.  Crawford,  smoking  an 
116 


English  bull-dog  pipe  in  which  is  some  of  Barrie's 
"Arcadia  Mixture,"  you  will  have  all  the  back 
ground  that  is  needed  for  this  conversation. 

"  You  know,"  he  said,  "  that  my  father,  Thomas 
Crawford,  was  a  Scotch-Irishman,  born  in  the  West 
of  Ireland,  and  brought  to  this  country  when  very 
young.  His  father  acquired  a  small  business  in  New 
York  which  supported  him  comfortably,  and  he 
wished  his  son,  my  father,  to  take  part  in  it ;  but  the 
boy  had  a  strong  artistic  bent,  and  of  his  own  initia 
tive  went  to  a  wood-carver  to  learn  his  trade.  Later, 
wishing  still  greater  freedom  for  his  skill,  he  learned 
marble-carving,  and,  by  a  curious  coincidence,  he 
designed  the  handsome  mantels  in  the  house  of  Mr. 
Ward,  his  future  father-in-law,  at  the  corner  of  Bond 
Street  and  Broadway.  This  and  other  of  his  work 
was  so  remarkable  that  my  grandfather  and  his  friends 
determined  that  he  should  have  the  best  opportunities 
to  study  sculpture,  and  he  was  sent  to  Rome,  where 
he  was  a  pupil  of  the  great  Thorwaldsen.  While  a 
young  sculptor  in  Rome,  gaining  recognition  every 
day,  he  met  Miss  Louisa  Ward,  who  was  travelling 
with  Dr.  Samuel  G.  Howe  and  his  wife,  Julia  Ward 
Howe.  They  fell  in  love  and  were  married,  and 
made  Rome  their  home.  I  am  the  youngest  of  their 
four  children.  When  I  was  about  two  years  old  (in 
1856)  I  was  sent  to  this  country,  and  lived  with 
some  kinsfolk  on  a  farm  near  Bordentown,  N.  J. 
Among  the  earliest  things  that  I  remember  is  my 
great  delight  in  watching  the  coming  and  going  of 
117 


the  trains  of  cars  as  they  shot  across  the  farm  near 
the  old  house.  My  father  died  in  London,  in  1857, 
when  I  was  three  years  old,  and  soon  after  I  was 
taken  back  to  Italy,  where  all  my  youth  was  spent." 

I  asked  Mr.  Crawford  to  tell  me  about  his  educa 
tion  as  a  boy.  It  seemed  to  recall  a  host  of  pleasant 
recollections. 

"  Most  of  my  boyhood  was  spent  under  the  direc 
tion  of  a  French  governess.  Not  only  did  I  learn 
that  language  from  her,  but  all  of  my  studies,  geog 
raphy,  arithmetic,  etc.,  were  taught  me  in  French, 
and  I  learned  to  write  it  with  great  readiness  as  a 
mere  boy,  because  it  was  the  language  of  my  daily 
tasks.  The  consequence  is  that  to  this  day  I  write 
French  with  the  ease  of  English.  There  have  been 
times  when  I  knew  that  I  had  lost  some  of  my  facility 
in  speaking  French,  through  long  absence  from  the 
country  ;  but  the  acquirement  of  writing  it  is  always 
with  me,  which  shows  the  value  of  early  impressions 
in  that  direction." 

I  remembered  hearing  St.  Paul's  School  men  speak 
of  the  days  when  Mr.  Crawford  was  a  student  at 
Concord,  N.  H.,  and  I  asked  him  when  he  had  been 
there. 

"  I  was  about  twelve  years  old,"  he  said,  "  when  I 
was  sent  over  to  America  again,  and  went  to  St. 
Paul's.  There  I  found  that  the  fact  that  I  had 
been  taught  Latin  by  a  natural,  and  not  an  artificial 
method,  gave  me  a  great  advantage.  My  Latin  tutor 
in  Rome  was  a  man  whose  ideas  of  learning  that  lan- 
118 


guage  were  most  original  then,  although  they  have 
since  become  more  common  in  certain  systems.  I 
remember  that  my  first  lesson  in  Latin  was  to  read 
one  of  the  very  short  letters  of  Cicero,  only  two  or 
three  lines.  We  began  by  reading,  and,  as  a  conse 
quence,  I  was  interested  from  the  very  first  lesson. 
You  know  that  in  Rome  you  are  surrounded  with 
Latin  inscriptions  on  the  public  buildings  and  monu 
ments,  so  that  the  whole  language  had  a  reality  to  me 
that  it  could  hardly  have  to  an  American  boy,  espe 
cially  one  who  has  learned  it  by  way  of  the  rudi 
ments  of  grammar. ' ' 

We  had  a  long  talk  about  the  various  steps  in  his 
education,  which  seemed  to  be  full  of  pleasant  mem 
ories  for  Mr.  Crawford.  He  recalled  his  student 
days  with  a  clergyman  in  the  English  village  of  Hat- 
field  Regis,  and  the  gayer  life  at  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  where  he  went  in  for  boating,  and,  in 
cidentally,  for  mathematics.  "  They  thought  I  was 
a  mathematician  in  those  days,"  he  said.  Then  fol 
lowed,  student  days  at  Karlsruhe  and  Heidelberg, 
from  1874  to  1876.  "Of  course,"  he  said,  "I 
learned  my  German  in  those  days — learned  to  speak 
it  readily ;  but  I  have  never  acquired  the  ability  to 
write  it  as  fluently  as  I  do  French. ' ' 

"And  then,"  he  continued,  "I  studied  at  the 
University  of  Rome  (1876-78),  and  I  had  a  tutor 
who  taught  me  Sanskrit,  and  interested  me  in  Buddh 
ism  and  other  Oriental  mysteries.  There  came  a 
time  when  my  people  lost  a  great  deal  of  money,  and 
119 


I  was  in  a  quandary  what  to  do.  This  tutor  advised 
me  to  take  an  opportunity  to  go  to  India  and  learn 
Sanskrit,  and  then  I  could  come  back  and  easily  get 
a  good  professorship.  So,  with  the  enthusiasm  of 
youth,  I  borrowed  one  hundred  pounds,  and  sailed 
for  Bombay.  But  money  seemed  to  be  as  hard  to 
earn  in  Bombay  as  elsewhere.  I  tried  in  vain  for  all 
sorts  of  positions.  I  wrote  occasionally  articles  for  a 
Bombay  newspaper,  and  made  the  acquaintance  of 
the  editor,  but  these  were  not  enough  to  replenish  my 
stock  of  money.  One  day  I  found  myself  reduced  to 
my  last  two  pounds,  and  I  could  not  see  where  more 
was  coming  from  ;  but  I  was  young  and  strong,  and 
I  said  that  if  the  worst  came,  I  could  enlist  in  the 
British  army,  and  have  plenty  of  adventure,  and  food 
and  clothes.  I  sat  down  and  wrote  a  letter  of  appli 
cation  to  the  proper  officer,  sealed  and  stamped  it, 
and  held  it  in  readiness  to  mail  when  I  should  find 
that  there  was  nothing  else  to  be  done.  The  next 
day  I  received  a  letter  from  the  editor  of  the  Bombay 
Gazette,  asking  me  to  call.  When  I  presented  my 
self,  he  said  that  he  had  received  a  letter  from  the 
proprietor  of  the  Allahabad  Indian  Herald,  asking 
whether  he  could  send  him  immediately  a  good  man 
to  take  charge  of  that  paper.  He  explained  to  me 
that  it  was  a  very  difficult  undertaking,  as  I  should 
have  to  do  all  the  editorial  work  myself;  that  Allaha 
bad  was  a  thousand  miles  away  ;  and  that,  in  certain 
seasons,  the  climate  was  disagreeable  and  dangerous. 
Nevertheless  he  asked  me  would  I  go  ?  '  Would  a 
120 


duck  swim  ? '  I  said,  and  started  immediately.  I 
found  that  the  paper  was  a  daily,  issued  every  after 
noon.  I  was  my  own  news  collector,  managing  ed 
itor,  and  editorial  writer.  I  wrote  a  leading  article 
and  several  editorial  paragraphs  every  day,  collected 
and  wrote  the  local  news,  edited  the  correspondence 
from  all  over  India — some  of  it  written  in  the  worst 
English  that  I  have  ever  encountered.  There  were 
days  when  I  worked  sixteen  hours  at  a  stretch ;  there 
were  days  at  the  beginning  of  the  rainy  season  when 
the  combination  of  heat  and  moisture  was  enough  to 
drive  a  man  who  had  nothing  to  do  to  an  extremity. 
How  much  worse  it  was,  you  can  imagine,  when  one 
had  to  work  sixteen  hours  in  that  atmosphere,  and 
that,  too,  in  daily  journalism,  an  occupation  in  which 
I  had  had  no  experience  whatever." 

I  said  that  it  reminded  me  of  a  story  of  Kipling's. 

"  Yes,"  he  replied,  "'The  Man  who  would  be 
King  ' — that  is  it  exactly.  I  always  read  Kipling 
with  a  flood  of  recollections  of  India,  so  true  are 
his  stories  to  the  reality.  Of  course,"  he  said,  "I 
picked  up  a  great  deal  about  Buddhism  and  other 
oriental  lore,  and  it  was  at  Simla  that  I  met  the  orig 
inal  of  Mr.  Isaacs  —  a  real  man  whose  name  was 
Jacobs.  Of  him  I  shall  tell  you  by  and  by.  For 
eighteen  months  I  edited  the  Indian  Herald,  and  I 
think  it  was  the  hardest  work  that  I  have  ever  done. 
By  and  by,  in  1880,  I  returned  to  Italy,  and  there  I 
again  found  myself  without  means  or  work,  so  I  took 
passage  on  an  old  steamer  for  America,  early  in  1881. 

121 


I  was  the  only  cabin  passenger  on  board.  The  boat 
was  a  regular  tramp  ;  we  struck  terrible  storms,  the 
machinery  broke  down,  and  under  sail  we  slowly 
made  our  way  westward.  I  had  always  been  fond  of 
die  sea,  and,  as  the  ship  was  short-handed,  I  took  my 
watch,  turn  and  turn  about,  with  the  captain  and  the 
mates.  After  six  weeks  we  got  to  Bermuda  in  a 
most  dilapidated  condition,  and  as  I  was  the  only 
one  who  could  speak  English,  the  captain  asked  me 
to  go  ashore  with  the  papers.  The  sea  was  running 
high,  and,  as  the  small  boat  turned  in  between  the 
headlands  toward  the  harbor,  the  high  waves  swamped 
us.  We  clung  to  the  boat,  and,  as  luck  would  have 
it,  a  launch  came  along  just  then  and  picked  us  up. 
After  we  had  refitted  at  Bermuda,  we  sailed  away 
toward  New  York,  and  finally  reached  here  in  March. 
I  liked  the  sea  and  I  liked  adventure,  and  so  the  voy 
age  did  not  seem  as  bad  as  it  might  have  been." 

"  You  should  put  that  voyage  in  a  story,"  I  sug 
gested,  thinking  of  some  of  Kipling's  tales  of  the  sea ; 
and  it  is  curious,  by  the  way,  that  Mr.  Crawford, 
with  all  his  love  of  the  sea,  has  never  written  a  reg 
ular  sea-story,  although  there  are  several  chapters  in 
"  Dr.  Claudius  "  describing  an  ocean  voyage. 

It  was  about  this  time,  when  he  was  twenty-seven 
years  of  age,  that  Mr.  Crawford  entered  Harvard  as  a 
special  student,  and  took  Professor  Lanman's  course 
in  Sanskrit.  He  lived  between  New  York  and  Bos 
ton,  sometimes  in  one  city  and  sometimes  in  the  other, 
from  December,  1882,  to  May,  1883,  and  contributed 

122 


special  articles  to  periodicals.  He  wrote  book  re 
views  and  articles  on  philosophical  themes.  "I  got 
so  far,"  he  said,  "as  to  receive  one  hundred  dollars 
for  an  article.  Of  course  it  was  a  precarious  living, 
but  there  was  always  Uncle  Sam  (Samuel  Ward)  to 
whom  I  could  go." 

"And  now  tell  me,"  I  said,  "the  true  story  of 
how  you  came  to  write  '  Mr.  Isaacs. '  I  have  read 
different  versions  of  it." 

"It  has  once  or  twice  been  told  correctly,"  said 
Mr.  Crawford,  "  and  this  is  exactly  how  it  happened  : 
On  May  5,  1882,  Uncle  Sam  asked  me  to  dine  with 
him  at  the  New  York  Club,  which  was  then  in  the 
building  on  Madison  Square,  now  called  the  Madison 
Square  Bank  Building.  It  goes  without  saying  that 
we  had  a  good  dinner  if  it  was  ordered  by  Uncle 
Sam.  We  had  dined  rather  early,  and  were  sitting 
in  the  smoking-room,  overlooking  Madison  Square, 
while  it  was  still  light.  As  was  perfectly  natural  we 
began  to  exchange  stories  while  smoking,  and  I  told 
him,  with  a  great  deal  of  detail,  my  recollections  of 
an  interesting  man  whom  I  had  met  in  Simla.  When 
I  had  finished  he  said  to  me,  <  That  is  a  good  two- 
part  magazine  story,  and  you  must  write  it  out  im 
mediately.'  He  took  me  around  to  his  apartments, 
and  that  night  I  began  to  write  the  story  of  '  Mr. 
Isaacs.'  Part  of  the  first  chapter  was  written  after 
ward,  but  the  rest  of  that  chapter  and  several  succeed 
ing  chapters  are  the  story  that  I  told  to  Uncle  Sam. 
I  kept  at  it  from  day  to  day,  getting  more  interested 
123 


in  the  work  as  I  proceeded,  and  from  time  to  time  I 
would  read  a  chapter  to  Uncle  Sam.  When  I  got 
through  the  original  story,  I  was  so  amused  with  the 
writing  of  it  that  it  occurred  to  me  that  I  might  as 
\vell  make  Mr.  Isaacs  fall  in  love  with  an  English 
girl,  and  then  I  kept  on  writing,  to  see  what  would 
happen.  By  and  by  I  remembered  a  mysterious 
Buddhist  whom  I  had  once  met  in  India,  and  so  I 
introduced  him,  to  still  further  complicate  matters. 
I  went  to  Newport  to  visit  my  aunt,  Mrs.  Julia  Ward 
Howe,  while  I  was  in  the  midst  of  the  story,  and 
continued  it  there.  It  was  on  June  13,  1882,  while 
in  her  home,  that  I  finished  the  last  chapter  of  '  Mr. 
Isaacs  ;  '  and,  Uncle  Sam  appearing  in  Newport  at 
that  time,  I  read  him  the  part  of  the  story  which  he 
had  not  heard.  '  You  will  give  it  to  me,'  he  said  ; 
'  I  shall  try  and  find  a  publisher. '  He  had  for  many 
years  frequented  the  book-store  of  Macmillan,  and 
was  well  acquainted  with  the  elder  George  Brett. 
He  took  the  manuscript  to  Mr.  Brett,  who  forwarded 
it  to  the  English  house,  and  in  a  short  time  it  was 
accepted." 

"Having  tasted  blood,"  said  Mr.  Crawford,  "I 
began,  very  soon  after  finishing  '  Mr.  Isaacs,'  to  write 
another  story  for  my  own  amusement — l  Dr.  Clau 
dius.'  Late  in  November  I  was  advised  by  Messrs. 
Macmillan  that  in  order  to  secure  an  English,  as  well 
as  an  American,  copyright,  I  must  be  on  English 
soil  on  the  day  of  publication.  So  I  went  to  St. 
John,  New  Brunswick,  where  I  had  a  very  pleasant 
124 


time,  and  continued  to  write  the  story  of '  Dr.  Clau 
dius/  which  I  finished  in  December.  '  Mr.  Isaacs  ' 
was  published  on  December  6th,  and  I,  of  course, 
knew  nothing  about  its  reception.  However,  toward 
the  end  of  the  month,  I  started  on  my  return  jour 
ney  to  the  United  States,  and  when  I  arrived  in  Bos 
ton,  on  the  day  before  Christmas,  and  stepped  out  of 
the  train,  I  was  surprised  beyond  measure  to  find  the 
railway  news-stands  almost  covered  with  great  posters 
announcing  '  Mr.  Isaacs.'  The  next  morning,  at 
my  hotel,  I  found  a  note  awaiting  me  from  T.  B. 
Aldrich,  then  editor  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  asking 
me  for  an  interview,  at  which  he  proposed  that  I 
write  a  serial  for  his  magazine.  I  felt  confident 
then,  and  do  now,  that  '  Dr.  Claudius  '  would  not  be 
a  good  serial  story.  However,  I  promised  that  he 
should  have  a  serial,  and  began  soon  after  to  write 
'The  Roman  Singer,'  which  was  completed  in  Feb 
ruary,  1883." 

This  led  me  to  ask  Mr.  Crawford  about  the  rapid 
ity  with  which  he  worked.  "  I  was  told  the  other 
day,"  I  said,  "  that  you  wrote  '  The  Three  Fates  '  in 
seven  days." 

"No,"  he  replied;  "that  would  have  been  a 
physical  impossibility.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  was  not 
very  well,  and  spent  a  whole  summer  writing  it  from 
time  to  time.  One  of  my  stories,  however,  '  Mar- 
zio's  Crucifix,'  which  is  not  a  long  novel,  I  wrote  in 
ten  days,  in  its  original  form,  as  it  appeared  serially. 
Afterward  two  chapters  were  added  for  book  publi- 


cation.  <  The  Tale  of  a  Lonely  Parish  '  I  wrote  in 
twenty-four  days — one  chapter  a  day,  of  about  five 
thousand  words.  Both  of  those  stories  were  easy  to 
write,  because  I  was  perfectly  familiar  with  the  back 
ground  of  each.  I  had  once  studied  silver-carving 
with  a  skilled  workman,  and  the  idea  suggested  itself 
to  me  to  write  a  story  about  an  atheist  who  should 
put  his  life  and  soul  into  the  carving  of  a  crucifix. 
With  that  for  a  motive,  the  story  wrote  itself.  In 
the  case  of  '  The  Lonely  Parish,'  I  found  myself  with 
a  promise  unredeemed,  given  to  my  publishers,  for  a 
novel  at  a  certain  date ;  I  had  already  sold  the  novel 
which  I  intended  for  them  to  a  magazine  for  serial 
publication.  So  I  looked  around  in  my  memory  for 
some  spot  which  was  thoroughly  familiar  to  me  as  a 
background  for  my  novel — so  familiar  that  I  need  not 
invent  details,  but  simply  call  them  up  from  my  mem 
ory.  I  immediately  thought  of  the  little  village  of 
Hatfield  Regis,  in  Hertfordshire,  where  I  was  sent  as 
a  pupil  to  a  clergyman.  I  lifted  that  little  village  bod 
ily  out  of  my  memory,  and  put  it  into  my  story,  even 
to  the  extent  of  certain  real  names  and  localities." 

The  life   of    Mr.    Crawford,   from   the   success   of 
''Mr.   Isaacs"  to  the  present  day,  has  been  one  of 
hard   literary  work.       He  sailed   for    Italy  in    May, 
1883,  spent  most  of  the  year  1884  in  Constantinople, 
where  he  was  married  to  a  daughter  of  General  Ber- 
dan,  and  in  1885  went  back  to  Italy  and  to  Sorrento, 
where  his  villa  is,  and  where  he  has  lived  ever  since, 
with  the  exception  of  his  visits  to  America  in  1893-5. 
126 


In  these  thirteen  years  he  has  produced  twenty-five 
novels,  and  his  popularity  continues  unabated. 

"  What,"  I  asked,  "is  the  germ  of  a  novel  for 
you?" 

"  It  is  a  character,  and  not  a  situation,  which  gen 
erally  suggests  a  novel  to  me.  I  think  that  in  most 
cases  my  characters  are  portraits  of  real  people  in 
imaginary  situations ;  that  is  why  they  cannot  be  re 
cognized  by  the  originals,  because  they  are  out  of 
their  usual  environment.  There  are  two  exceptions 
to  this  way  of  conceiving  a  novel ;  as  I  have  already 
told  you,  '  The  Tale  of  a  Lonely  Parish  '  and  '  Mar- 
zio's  Crucifix  '  were  suggested  to  me  by  the  real  back 
ground." 

"Won't  you  tell  me,"  I  asked,  "how  you  goto 
work  to  construct  a  novel  ?  ' ' 

"  Since  my  first  novel  or  two,  I  always  see  the  end 
of  the  story  from  the  start.  When  I  have  thought  it 
over -in  this  way,  I  take  a  large  sheet  of  paper,  and, 
having  decided  on  the  size  of  the  book,  I  make  up  my 
mind  that  it  shall  have — say  twenty-four  chapters. 
Along  the  left  margin  I  mark  the  numbers  of  these 
chapters,  one  under  the  other,  a  line  for  each.  If  it 
is  to  be  in  three  volumes,  as  most  of  my  novels  are  in 
England,  I  place  a  horizontal  mark  after  each  eight 
chapter  numbers.  That  indicates  the  volume.  Then, 
after  the  manner  of  a  playwright  choosing  what  he 
calls  his  « curtain  situation,'  I  decide  on  the  culminat 
ing  incident  in  each  volume,  and  also  decide  in 
which  chapter  it  shall  fall,  and  place  a  catchword  in- 
127 


dicating  that  situation  on  the  line  with  the  chapter 
number.  Then  I  fill  in  for  the  other  chapters  a 
catchword  or  phrase  which  indicates  the  minor  inci 
dents  in  succession  that  culminate  in  the  major  inci 
dent.  Of  course  all  these  things  do  not  come  at 
once,  and  I  may  fill  in,  from  time  to  time,  after  I  have 
begun  the  novel.  But  when  the  skeleton  is  compara 
tively  complete,  I  begin  to  work.  Along  the  right- 
hand  margin  I  write  down  the  calendar  of  the  novel, 
as  it  may  be  called,  from  day  to  day.  If  it  is  a  novel 
in  which  the  action  takes  place  in  a  very  short  time, 
I  write  down  not  only  the  day  of  the  month  and 
week,  but  the  hour  of  the  day,  so  that  the  action  of 
the  story  may  move  logically.  With  this  skeleton  of 
the  novel  before  me,  I  write  with  great  rapidity.  I 
have  found  that  if  I  write  a  novel  slowly  my  concep 
tion  of  the  leading  characters  may  change  from  week 
to  week,  so  that  in  the  end  the  novel  is  not  so  forcible 
or  so  complete  as  those  written  rapidly." 

"  Do  you  ever  dictate?  "  I  asked. 

"  I  dictated  one  novel  under  stress  of  circumstances, 
and  I  do  not  think  that  I  shall  ever  dictate  another, 
for  I  consider  it  a  relative  failure." 

"  You  are  oftenest  thought  of,  I  think,  as  the  author 
of  the  Saracinesca  group  of  stories.  Could  you  tell 
me  how  you  planned  them  ?  ' ' 

"  I   think  the  origin   of  the  stories  was  a  walk  I 

took,   in  the  interior  of  Italy,  with  a  tutor,  when  I 

was  a  boy — the  region  in  which  I  have  placed  the 

Saracinesca  estates.      When  I  wrote  the  first  novel  of 

128 


the  series  I  did  not  intend  a  group ;  but  the  plan 
grew  upon  me,  and  the  first  story  was  received  so 
kindly  that  I  decided  to  continue  the  history  through 
several  generations,  and  make  it,  in  a  sense,  represen 
tative  of  the  life  of  the  nobility  of  a  certain  class  in 
modern  Italy." 

"You  have  been  writing  a  group  of  New  York 
novels,  in  which  the  fortunes  of  a  family  are  elabo 
rated  after  the  manner  of  your  Saracinesca  series  ?  ' ' 

"  Yes  ;  I  worked  very  hard  at  the  group,  and  the 
first  of  the  series,  '  Katharine  Lauderdale,'  has  already 
gone  through  many  editions.  The  second  is  called 
1  The  Ralstons. '  Some  of  the  characters  also  appear 
in  my  little  novel  of  Bar  Harbor,  '  Love  in  Idleness.' 
In  i  Casa  Braccio,'  I  have  introduced  characters  from 
both  the  Italian  and  American  groups  of  novels. ' ' 

This  ended  our  conversation.  The  impression  left 
on  my  mind  was  of  delightful  converse  with  a  virile, 
strong,  intellectual  man,  whose  imagination  and 
emotions  are  the  obedient  servants  of  a  dominating 
will ;  above  all  things,  a  man  of  the  world  in  the  best 
sense,  and  a  scholar  in  the  best  sense,  whose  knowl 
edge  is  a  delight  to  him,  whose  contact  with  people 
in  great  cities  has  broadened  and  deepened  his  serious 
views  of  life  ;  a  man  with  that  poise  of  body  and 
mind  which  assures  one  that  at  forty  his  work  as  a 
novelist  has  hardly  reached  maturity,  but  that  the 
best  of  it  lies  in  the  future. 


129 


HENRY  VAN  DYKE 

IF  you  walk  across  the  campus  under  the  old  elms  at 
Princeton,  almost  any  night  of  the  spring  or  fall 
terms,  you  will  probably  hear  somewhere  a  group  or 
marching  body  of  students  singing,  to  the  tune  of 
"Marching  through  Georgia" — 

"  Nassau !  Nassau  !  Ring  out  the  chorus  free. 
Nassau !  Nassau !  Thy  jolly  sons  are  we. 
Cares  shall  be  forgotten,  all  our  sorrows  flung  away, 
While  we  are  marching  thro'  Princeton !  " 

Most  of  the  fun  which  Princeton  students  have  had 
in  the  past  twenty  years  has  been  enjoyed  to  the 
words  of  this  song,  written  by  Henry  van  Dyke,  of 
the  Class  of  '73.  Since  that  time  he  has  turned  his 
attention  to  other  things,  and  has  been  hard  at  work 
for  fifteen  years  as  the  minister  of  two  large  churches, 
one  at  Newport  and  one  in  New  York.  Of  course  it 
is  hardly  fair  to  hold  Dr.  van  Dyke  responsible  for 
all  the  revels  which  his  song  has  inspired  ;  but  a  strict 
Calvinist  cannot  refrain  from  putting  it  on  record 
that  any  account  of  the  life  and  works  of  Dr.  van 
130 


Dyke  which  does  not  take  this  song  into  the  reckon 
ing  is  incomplete. 

It  is  a  good  song,  at  any  rate,  for  the  reason  that 
Dr.  van  Dyke  has  always  been  a  wholesome  man. 
It  is  hard  to  spoil  a  man  who  has  always  been  fond  of 
hunting  and  fishing  and  the  free  life  of  the  woods. 
Three  years  at  a  theological  seminary  can't  drive 
that  out  of  a  man,  especially  if  his  father  was  fond  of 
the  same  things  and  taught  him  to  love  them. 

"I  have  fished  from  Norway  to  the  Nile,"  he  re 
cently  said,  ' '  and  the  only  kind  of  hunting  I  do  not 
like  is  heresy-hunting." 

I  asked  him  for  a  "basis  of  facts"  from  which  I 
could  start  to  build  up  a  character  for  him,  and  he 
replied : 

"On  reflection  I  am  chagrined  to  discover  how 
few  facts  there  are  in  my  personal  history — unless  you 
propose  to  count  as  facts  the  fish  caught  from  the  age 
of  five  to  the  present  time. ' ' 

I  tried  to  talk  theology  with  him  one  afternoon  in 
order  to  discover  whether  I  could  approve  of  his 
Presbyterianism,  but  he  switched  the  talk  over  to  fish 
ing  for  land-locked  salmon  at  the  Grande  Decharge, 
and  closed  the  theological  discussion  with  the  story  of 
catching  three  brook  trout  in  Lily  Bay,  up  in  Maine, 
that  weighed  eleven  pounds. 

That  is  why  I  can't  give  his  views  on  the  inerran 
cy  of  the  Scriptures  in  this  sketch.  But  I  do  know, 
for  he  has  stated  it  with  emphasis,  that  he  has  been 
trying  "  to  do  his  part  in  keeping  elbow-room  for  a 


healthy  mind  in  the  Presbyterian  Church — believing 
that  a  little  modest  ignorance  is  the  best  foundation 
for  a  sound  theology. ' ' 

Every  one  who  lives  in  New  York  knows  that  Dr. 
van  Dyke  is  doing  this  very  successfully  in  the  his 
toric  old  Brick  Church  at  the  corner  of  Fifth  Avenue 
and  Thirty-seventh  Street.  He  has  gathered  around 
him  there  a  strong  congregation  of  refined  people, 
who  are  interested  in  the  aesthetic  problems  of  living 
as  well  as  the  moral.  For,  so  far  as  I  can  judge,  the 
aim  of  Dr.  Van  Dyke's  preaching  and  writing  is  to 
lead  people  to  live  full,  healthy,  and  rational  lives 
— with  due  regard  to  truth  and  beauty,  as  well  as 
goodness.  He  has,  I  think,  put  a  great  deal  of  his 
creed  into  the  dedication  of  his  volume  on  "The 
Poetry  of  Tennyson  :  ' ' 

To  a  Young  Woman  of  an  Old  Fashion,  who  loves 
Art,  not  for  its  own  sake,  but  because  it  ennobles  life  ; 
who  reads  Poetry  not  to  kill  time  but  to  fill  it  with 
beautiful  thoughts  ;  and  who  still  believes  in  God  and 
Duty  and  Immortal  Love. 

In  one  of  his  books  he  says,  "A  short  creed  well 
believed  and  honestly  applied  is  what  we  need.  The 
world  waits,  and  we  must  pray  and  labor,  not  for  a 
more  complete  and  logical  Theology,  but  for  a  more 
real  and  true  and  living  Christianity." 

He  put  it  all  in  a  nutshell  one  day  when  we  were 
talking,  when  he  said:  "It's  better  to  live  than  to 
write  about  life." 

As  a  literary  man  Dr.  van  Dyke  has  received  the 
132 


widest  recognition  for  "The  Poetry  of  Tennyson," 
which  is  not  only  a  careful  study  of  the  technic  of  the 
poet,  but  in  a  much  broader  way  is  an  interpretation 
of  the  views  of  art  and  life  with  which  the  poems 
abound.  Tennyson  appealed  to  him  because  his 
poems  "voiced  the  great  reaction  out  of  the  heart  of 
a  doubting  age,  toward  the  Christianity  of  Christ  and 
the  trust  in  Immortal  Love."  This  volume  met  with 
the  warmest  approval  from  the  poet  himself,  who  fur 
nished  material  to  make  the  second  edition  more 
complete.  During  the  last  summer  of  his  life,  at  the 
laureate's  express  wish,  Dr.  van  Dyke  visited  him  in 
England,  and  received  his  cordial  thanks  for  his 
sympathetic  interpretation. 

Another  volume  which  has  been  welcomed  with 
great  favor  is  "The  Christ-Child  in  Art,"  which  is 
a  commentary  on  the  work  of  the  masters  in  painting 
who  have  portrayed  the  Madonna  and  Child. 

He  has  also  written  a  number  of  allegorical  stories 
of  unusual  beauty  in  diction,  and  most  graceful  in 
fancy,  among  them  ' '  The  Oak  of  Geismar ' '  and 
"The  Source"  in  Scribncr's,  and  "The  Story  of 
the  Other  Wise  Man  "  in  Harper'' 's.  Some  day  he 
will  put  these,  with  other  stories,  in  a  volume  which 
will  gain  for  him  recognition  in  another  literary  field. 

Dr.  van  Dyke's  volumes  of  distinctly  religious  im 
port  are  "  The  Reality  of  Religion  "  (1884),  "  The 
Story  of  the  Psalms"  (1887),  and  "Straight  Ser 
mons"  (1893).  And  of  equal  moral  importance 
might  be  mentioned  his  yellow-covered  tract  on  the 
133 


copyright  question  which  was  entitled  "  The  Sin  of 
Literary  Piracy." 

To  any  one  still  hungering  for  a  "  basis  of  facts  " 
about  Dr.  van  Dyke,  it  may  be  said  that  he  is  the 
son  of  the  late  Henry  J.  van  Dyke,  for  so  many  years 
pastor  of  the  First  Presbyterian  Church  in  Brooklyn. 
He  was  born  November  10,  1852,  in  Germantown, 
Pa.,  just  "  two  hundred  years  after  the  arrival  of  his 
ancestor,  Jan  Thomasse  van  Dyke,  in  this  country," 
and  he  is,  therefore,  "  Dutch  as  Holland."  He  was 
graduated  at  the  Brooklyn  Polytechnic  Institute  in 
1869,  at  Princeton  College  in  1873,  and  Princeton 
Theological  Seminary  in  1877.  He  further  studied 
philosophy  and  theology  in  Berlin  under  Weiss, 
Dorner,  and  Harms.  He  was  pastor  of  the  United 
Congregational  Church,  Newport,  R.  I.,  in  1879-82, 
and  in  1883  came  to  the  old  Brick  Church  in  New 
York.  Princeton  gave  him  the  degree  of  D.D.  in 
1884.  Harvard  elected  him  University  Preacher  for 
1890-92,  and  he  was  appointed  to  the  Lyman 
Beecher  lectureship  at  Yale  for  1895-96. 


ARCADIAN   OPINIONS 


SUMMER  READING 

WHY  should  anyone  read  books  for  amusement  in 
summer?  Amusement  is  a  matter  of  choice, 
until  riches  make  of  it  a  profession.  Of  course  for 
the  very  rich  amusement  and  pleasure  are  simply  the 
synonyms  of  spending  money  agreeably.  That  usu 
ally  implies  the  spending  of  it  ostentatiously  or  in  a 
way  to  arouse  the  envy  of  those  less  fortunate.  But 
the  well-to-do  man  or  woman  of  scant  or  moderate 
leisure  cannot  afford  to  take  envy  into  account  as  one 
of  the  forms  of  amusement.  And  it  usually  happens 
that  they  are  the  very  people  who  put  a  few  books  in 
a  corner  of  their  luggage  when  they  start  off  to  camp 
or  the  seashore  for  a  breathing  spell.  If  you  ask 
them  why,  they  always  say  that  it  may  rain  for  a  day 
or  two,  and  moreover  the  days  are  so  long  ! 

Can  anyone  imagine  the  days  being  too  long  for  a 
dweller  in  the  city  who  has  only  one  month  of  the 
twelve  in  which  to  loose  himself  from  the  routine  of 
living !  The  trouble  is  with  that  very  routine  to 
which  his  nerves  have  become  so  adjusted  that  they 
respond  with  pleasure  to  it  alone.  When  it  isn't 
pursued  he  misses  it,  just  as  he  misses  his  wife,  whom 
137 


he  knows  he  has  unhappily  married.  But  then  he 
has  become  used  to  her  particular  way  of  quarrelling, 
and  his  faculties  respond  to  it  with  alertness. 

It  is  the  same  Avay  with  reading.  He  was  brought 
up  to  believe  that  there  was  some  particular  virtue  in 
a  book  ;  that  it  had  an  intimate  connection  with 
what  was  called  "  improvement  of  the  mind."  So 
when  he  had  leisure  he  went  for  a  book,  as  a  toper 
for  whiskey.  By  and  by  he  found  that  it  made  him 
"  forget  things,"  and  he  accumulated  his  little  likes 
and  dislikes  for  various  authors  as  he  would  for  brands 
of  cigars.  When  he  got  that  far  he  believed  that  he 
had  acquired  "  taste"  in  reading,  and  perhaps  he 
began  to  accumulate  a  library  as  he  would  a  wine- 
cellar. 

So  when  he  goes  off  for  a  summer  vacation  you 
will  see  him,  on  a  rainy  day  in  camp,  pull  out  a  book 
and  go  at  it  with  the  complacency  of  a  man  who 
knows  he  is  doing  his  duty.  There  may  be  half 
a  dozen  interesting  men  in  camp  who  have  seen  a 
great  deal  of  the  world  near  at  hand.  He  never  looks 
on  them  as  an  opportunity.  He  would  rather  read  a 
book  by  some  interesting  invalid  who  likes  to  put  her 
sensations  on  paper,  than  talk  with  a  man  who  had 
slain  wild  beasts  in  a  jungle,  or  ran  for  sheriff  in  a 
Western  mining-camp. 

Most  contemporary  books  (except  as  repositories  of 
valuable  information)  are  merely  substitutes  for  en 
tertaining  men  and  women,  and  usually  very  poor 
substitutes.  Your  manner  of  life  may  make  it  neces- 

138 


sary  for  you  to  enlarge  your  horizon  principally  by 
books  when  at  home ;  but  when  you  are  away  from 
the  old  surroundings,  if  you  are  the  wise  man  you 
think  you  are,  you  will  leave  your  books  at  home  and 
try  to  meet  some  new  types  of  the  human  animal.  It 
may  make  you  more  contented  with  your  own  way 
of  life  to  discover  how  many  worse  kinds  there  are. 


139 


"SANT  ILARIO"  IN   CAMP 

ONE'S  recollection  of  a  book  is  composite — part 
the  impression  made  by  the  literary  creation,  and 
part  by  the  circumstances  under  which  it  was  read. 
Many  a  dull  book  becomes  a  pleasant  memory,  and  a 
work  of  genius  perhaps  is  associated  with  pain. 

To  think  of  Crawford's  "  Sant'  Ilario,"  recalls  a 
rainy  day  at  Cedar  Island  Camp.  The  foreground  of 
the  memory  is  the  streets  and  squares  of  modern 
Rome ;  the  background  is  a  broad  gray  surface  of 
water  stretching  off  to  a  shore  covered  with  stately 
cedars,  poplars,  and  balsams.  As  in  a  cyclorama,  it  is 
hard  to  distinguish  where  Rome  ends  and  the  Adiron 
dack  lake  begins.  You  know  that  the  beautiful  Co 
rona  lived  in  the  stately  Palazzo  Saracinesca,  and  you 
half  believe  that  in  one  corner  of  that  palace  there  is 
a  long,  narrow  room  with  a  wolf-skin  stretched  on 
the  wall,  and  two  bucks'  heads  on  either  side.  And 
outside  there  is  a  rustic  piazza  with  rubber  coats,  and 
guns,  and  fishing-tackle  hanging  on  the  logs. 

Through  the  open  door  you  hear  men's  voices — 
laughter  and  blunt  repartee,  with  a  story  now  and 
then.  Somehow  you  cannot  quite  determine  whether 
140 


Sa/it'  Ilario,  Gouache,  and  San  Giacinto,  are  having 
a  game  of  poker  or  whether  it  is  the  three  guides. 
You  are  sure,  however,  that  the  game  is  being  played 
by  the  correct  American  rules.  The  excitement 
deepens ;  you  are  absorbed  in  the  story,  and  feel  that 
a  great  crisis  has  been  reached  when  the  Garibaldians 
and  Papal  troops  have  a  battle  while  the  fate  of  a 
"jack-pot"  is  being  determined.  You  hold  your 
breath  as  the  Papal  soldiers  charge  up  the  hill,  and 
are  ready  to  break  into  cheers  at  the  bravery  of  the 
solitary  figure  on  a  rampart  tearing  down  the  stone 
wall  while  the  bullets  strike  all  around  him.  With  his 
fate  still  in  doubt,  you  hear  a  shout  of  triumph,  and 
learn  that  "  four  trays  "  have  been  successfully  played 
against  "three  bullets,"  and  that  the  "jack-pot"' 
had  been  "  scooped  by  Abner  " — to  use  the  elegant 
phrase  which  lingers  in  your  ear. 

This  victory  overshadows  the  battle  of  the  Papal 
troops,  and  increases  in  importance  with  later  reports 
that  "Ab  has  cleaned  up  both  the  Old  Man  and 
Iry." 

Then  night  comes  down  with  the  pouring  rain. 
All  dwellers  in  the  Adirondacks  are  divided  into  two 
classes — Guides  and  Sports — and  both  classes  gather 
around  the  roaring  fire.  You  join  the  circle,  and  in 
the  quiet  of  an  after-dinner  smoke  float  off  to  Rome 
and  the  Saracinesca.  The  fate  of  the  beautiful  Faus 
tina  is  becoming  engrossing,  when  the  Old  Man 
breaks  the  silence  with  a  bear  story.  Mr.  Crawford 
cannot  hold  his  own  as  a  teller  of  stories  with  an  in- 
141 


telligent  Adirondack  guide.  You  soon  leave  Faustina 
in  prison  to  follow  the  veteran  guide  into  a  bear's 
cave  ;  or  to  go  on  a  trail  with  him  through  the  forest 
after  a  bear  that  ran  so  fast  that  he  left  the  mark  of 
his  stomach  in  the  light  snow  at  every  jump. 
"  There  ain't  no  dog  in  these  parts  can  catch  them 
on  a  dead  run,"  he  said  to  the  incredulous. 

When  the  stories  are  ended  you  go  to  sleep  in  a 
bark  cottage  by  the  edge  of  the  lake,  and  dream  that 
Sant*  Ilario  is  watching  for  deer  with  you  in  the 
flow-ground  ;  that  you  push  the  boat  on  a  marsh 
island,  and  build  a  little  fire  of  twigs  and  rushes  ;  that 
while  the  hounds  are  baying  along  the  hillside,  Sant* 
Ilario  and  you  are  discussing  the  next  move  of  Gari 
baldi,  and  plotting  to  release  the  beautiful  Faustina 
from  prison.  Two  shots  down  by  Windmill  Point 
startle  you  !  "  That  was  Gouache  shooting  the  deer," 
says  Sant"*  Ilario.  Then  you  hear  the  clear,  sharp 
whistle  of  the  huntsman  calling  in  the  hounds,  and 
you  know  that  the  chase  is  ended. 

Together  you  row  through  the  dead  and  spectral- 
like  trees  of  the  flow-ground,  and  out  into  the  open 
lake.  Soon  you  land  on  Windmill  Point. 

"Where  is  the  big  buck?"  you  ask.  And  in 
your  dream  you  do  not  know  whether  it  is  Gouache 
or  Abner  who  replies  : 

"  It's  a  yearlin'  doe.     We  robbed  the  cradle." 

The  dream  is  prophetic  of  the  great  hunt  on  which 
you  start  that  day.     In   the  evening  a  huge  fire  of 
roots  and  knots  is  built  in  front  of  the  open  camp. 
142 


It  is  a  gloomy,  rainy  night,  but  the  camp  is  a  cheery 
place.  You  sit  on  a  bed  of  spruce  boughs  and  watch 
the  swaying  flames  —  imagining  that  Montevarchi, 
Giovanni,  and  the  rest  are  sitting  in  the  shadow. 

"  What  do  you  think  of  '  Sant'  Ilario?  '  "  is  asked 
from  a  cloud  of  smoke  which  may  belong  to  Gouache1  s 
pipe. 

"It  has  given  me  so  much  pleasure,"  you  say, 
"  and  is  so  interwoven  with  our  experiences  on  this 
beautiful  lake  that  I  cannot  express  a  critical  opinion. 
All  I  know  is  that  it  made  a  rainy  clay  in  camp  seem 
short.  For  me  it  is  hereafter  a  part  of  Cedar  Island  ; 
and  when  I  smell  the  odor  of  spruce,  or  am  awakened 
by  the  music  of  waters,  I  shall  at  once  think  of  '  Sant' 
Ilario.'  " 


A  LEGEND  OF  THE  HAPPY   VALLEY 

MIDWAY  between  the  crisp  air  and  keen  intelli 
gence  of  the  North  and  the  lazy  breezes  of  the 
impulsive  South,  there  is  a  Happy  Valley.  It  lies  in 
the  sheltering  arms  of  two  beautiful  mountain  ranges  : 
the  North  Mountain  peaks  are  blue  and  rugged,  stand 
ing  out  against  the  sky  with  bare,  wrinkled,  mascu 
line  brows  ;  but  the  South  Mountain  is  a  long,  wavy 
line  of  soft,  feminine  curves,  clad  from  head  to  foot 
in  rich  velvet — dark  and  green.  The  dwellers  in  the 
Happy  Valley  have  long  believed  that  they  are 
watched  over  by  two  good  Spirits  :  the  genius  of  the 
North  Mountain  is  a  stern  but  benignant  old  man, 
while  the  South  Mountain  is  the  home  of  a  gracious 
woman,  full  of  charity  and  tenderness.  Whether  the 
people  in  the  Valley  are  happy  because  these  kind 
Spirits  really  exist,  or  merely  because  they  believe  in 
their  existence,  has  never  been  determined  by  the 
sages  who  live  there.  They  are  content  to  know  that 
the  force  of  the  North  wind  is  broken  before  it  reaches 
them,  and  that  the  scorching  sirocco  is  cooled  as  it 
glides  over  the  brow  of  the  Southern  hills. 

One  Christmas  Eve,  very  long  ago,  the  good  Spirits 
144 


looked  down  on  the  Valley,  which  was  filled  with 
laughter,  good-will,  and  song  that  rose  up  like  a  flood 
to  the  very  tops  of  the  mountains,  and  overflowed 
into  the  country  beyond. 

But  there  was  one  gloomy  young  man  there,  who 
sat  in  a  room  filled  with  shadows,  and  looked  out 
upon  a  hill-top  where  the  light  of  the  stars  showed  a 
windrow  of  snow  on  the  grave  of  his  best  friend. 

"  How  shall  we  bring  cheer  to  him  on  Christmas 
Day?"  asked  the  good  Spirits  of  each  other;  and 
far  into  the  night  they  debated  the  question,  sending 
messages  back  and  forth  so  frequently  that  belated 
men  thought  the  air  was  filled  with  snow7. 

The  old  man  on  the  North  Mountain  insisted  that 
Wisdom  would  be  his  best  comforter,  but  the  Hama 
dryad  of  the  South  was  equally  convinced  of  the 
power  of  Love.  The  end  of  the  long  discussion  was 
a  compromise,  by  which  both  Wisdom  and  Love 
were  to  be  offered  to  the  sorrowful  young  man  on 
Christmas  Day. 

So  it  happened  that  on  the  morrow  the  young 
man's  Boston  uncle  sent  him  the  Best  Hundred 
Books,  and  his  cousin  from  Virginia  arrived,  accom 
panied  with  a  beautiful  daughter,  whose  eyes  were 
like  the  depths  of  a  pine  forest  when  the  sunlight  sifts 
through  the  boughs. 

For  five  years  the  young  man  was  absent  from  t'he 
Happy  Valley.   He  loved  much,  he  read  many  books, 
he  travelled  and  studied  in  many  lands ;  and  when 
MS 


he  came  home  again  on  Christmas  Eve,  with  wife  and 
children,  men  called  him  wise.  He  was  back  in  the 
old  home,  in  the  shadow-haunted  room,  looking  out 
in  the  starlight  upon  the  grave  on  the  hill.  Again 
the  good  mountain  Spirits  looked  down  upon  the  Val 
ley  and  saw  his  face.  There  was  no  gloom  in  it, 
neither  was  there  great  joy.  They  could  not  read 
the  riddle  of  his  countenance,  and  they  filled  the  air 
above  the  Valley  with  their  vain  questions. 

"  Come,"  said  the  rugged  old  Genie  of  the  North, 
"  let  us  go  down  into  the  Valley  and  talk  with  this 
young  man  who  has  lived  and  suffered.  We  have 
dwelt  on  the  mountain  tops  so  long  that  we  are  out 
of  touch  with  Humanity." 

"  I  will  go  with  you,"  said  the  gentle  Hamadryad, 
"  though  sympathy  and  love  have  always  kept  me 
nearer  than  you  to  the  hearts  of  the  people.  My 
mountain  tops  are  not  in  the  clouds. ' ' 

So  together  they  drifted  into  the  presence  of  the 
young  man — strange  forms  of  "mingled  mist  and 
light." 

"  Five  years  ago  I  started  you  on  the  way  of  Wis 
dom,"  said  the  grizzled  old  Genie.  "Then  you 
were  in  the  shadow  of  a  great  sorrow  ;  now  I  think  J 
see  you  filled  with  peace.  Tell  us — is  Wisdom,  then, 
the  royal  road  to  happiness  ?  ' ' 

When  the  young  man  raised  his  eyes  they  were  full 

of  doubts  and  ambitions,  struggling  at  the  windows 

of  his  mind  for  glimpses  of  the  light.      "  My  friend," 

he  said,  "  you  started  me  upon  an  arduous  journey. 

146 


I  have  toiled  on  through  fog  and  marsh,  without 
once  feeling  sure  that  I  was  upon  the  right  way.  I 
only  know  that  I  have  a  stouter  heart  than  when  I 
started,  and  I  have  courage  left  to  cheer  those  who 
reach  out  their  hands  to  me  from  the  darkness." 

"But  my  gift  of  Love,"  said  the  Hamadryad; 
' '  surely  it  brought  you  more  of  happiness  and  joy 
than  this  ?  ' ' 

"Love,"  said  the  young  man,  "was  a  precious 
gift,  but  it  has  doubled  fate's  opportunities  to  do  me 
harm.  Now,  more  than  ever,  am  I  the  football  of 
chance,  and  my  capacity  for  suffering  is  increased. 
Love  has  brought  me  many  things,  but  not  happi 
ness." 

"What,  then,"  said  the  good  Spirits  together, 
"  have  Love  and  Wisdom  brought  you  that  are  worth 
the  having  ?  ' ' 

"  Hope  !  "  he  said,  while  the  Kght  of  a  new  day 
was  creeping  in  at  the  window  and  brightening  his 
tired  face,  "not  for  myself,  but  for " 

"Merry  Christmas!"  the  children  shouted  in 
glee,  as  the  door  swung  suddenly  open.  Their  faces 
were  radiant  with  hope,  and  in  them  was  the  promise 
of  the  future.  The  Genie  and  the  Hamadryad  show 
ered  blessings  on  them  as  they  vanished  toward  the 
mountain  tops. 


147 


A   PLEA  FOR   "DIANA" 

A   MEMORY   OF   THE   LIGHTHOUSE  AT   MONTEREY. 

THE  lighthouse-keeper  led  them  through  a  neatly 
furnished  room  or  two,  up  an  easy  stairway,  and 
then  abruptly  to  a  perpendicular  ladder,  at  the  top  of 
which  there  was  a  square  of  clear,  blue  sky — "a 
silky  blue,"  said  Adrian,  "  like  a  Yale  banner  at  th$ 
top  of  a  coach  on  a  football  day. ' '  When  he  reached 
the  last  rung  of  the  ladder  and  stepped  out  onto  the 
breezy  platform  around  the  great  sea-light,  the  silken 
banner  had  become  an  immeasurable  dome  of  lumi 
nous  blue,  without  a  fleck  or  spot  of  any  other  color. 

As  Dupont  pulled  his  rotund  body  through  the 
narrow  opening  and  stood  in  the  bright  sunlight  he 
found  breath  to  say  : 

"Ah,  Adrian,  my  friend,  I  now  appreciate  how 
Dante  felt  when  he  had  reached  the  top  of  the  moun 
tain  of  Purgatory  and  emerged  upon  the  beautiful 
Terrestrial  Paradise,  and  Virgil  said  to  him  : 

"  '  Beyond  the  steep  ways  and  the  narrow  art  thou  ; 

Behold  the  sun  that  shines  upon  thy  forehead  ; 

Behold  the  grass,  the  flowers,  and  the  shrubs, 

Which  of  itself  alone  this  land  produces  I '  " 

148 


"  If  I  am  playing  Virgil  to  your  Dante  on  this  trip 
to  Monterey,"  said  Adrian,  "  I  must  remind  you  that 
it  was  on  the  borders  of  the  Terrestrial  Paradise  that 
Virgil  said  good-by  and  left  Dante  to  the  fascinations 
of  Matilda  and  Beatrice.  See,  there  is  one  of  them 
now,  going  across  the  fields  to  St.  Mary's-by-the- 
Sea— 

'  A  lady  all  alone,  who  went  along 
Singing  and  culling  floweret  after  floweret, 
With  which  her  pathway  was  all  painted  over.' 

Can  you  believe  that  this  is  Christmas  Day;  that 
Matilda  there  is  going  to  her  devotions  in  midwin 
ter,  clothed  in  white  lawn  and  culling  poppies  by 
the  way ;  that  yesterday  we  were  shivering  on  the 
peaks  of  the  Sierras,  and  to-day  we  are  fanning  our 
selves  by  the  Pacific?  No,  Dante,  Virgil  made  a 
huge  error  in  leaving  you  at  the  edge  of  the  Terres 
trial  Paradise  !  I  propose  to  stay — at  least  till  Bea 
trice  appears.  I  warn  you  I  can't  endure  Beatrice, 
with  the  everlasting  '  splendor  of  her  laughing  eyes. ' 
Dante  may  have  been  deeply  in  love  with  Beatrice, 
but  it  has  always  seemed  strange  to  me  that  he  re 
membered  no  other  feature  than  her  eyes.  I  think 
of  her  as  one  of  those  uninteresting  women  who  make 
their  eyes  do  duty  for  wit,  intelligence,  and  vivac 
ity." 

"  We  are  too  old  for  such  as  Beatrice,  Adrian.  At 
our  age  the  only  woman  in  the  world  is  like  Diana 
of  The  Crossways" 

"  There  you  are  again  with  one  of  George  Mere- 
149 


dith's  heroines !  From  the  Gotham  Club  to  the 
tennis  grounds  at  Del  Monte  I  have  had  the  journey 
across  the  continent  decorated  with  eulogies  of  Mere 
dith." 

"  Come,  Adrian,  be  honest.  Confess  that  since 
we  left  Salt  Lake  your  trips  to  the  smoking-car  have 
been  made  to  elude  my  ridicule  while  you  read 
Diana. ' ' 

"I  see  there  is  no  escape  from  you,  Dupont. 
Either  we  must  discuss  Diana,  or  separate,  like  Vir 
gil  and  Dante,  on  Christmas  Day." 

"It  can't  be  helped.  That  stretch  of  dimpling, 
sunny  water  there,  across  the  bay  to  Santa  Cruz,  re 
minds  me  irresistibly  of  Diana — with  '  all  her  face 
one  tender  sparkle  of  a  smile. '  ' 

"Go  on,"  said  Adrian.  "Your  admiration  for 
Meredith  is  a  mania  which  can  only  be  cured  by  giv 
ing  it  free  vent." 

"  Well,  then,  I'll  give  you  an  unreasonable  super 
lative  to  start  with.  To  me  Diana  Warwick  is 
among  the  few  irresistible  women  of  fiction.  Other 
writers  may  tell  you  over  and  over  again  that  a 
woman  is  witty,  fascinating,  intelligent  in  every  mo 
tion  of  her  mind.  Meredith  does  a  much  more  diffi 
cult  thing — he  shows  you  the  wit  and  intelligence, 
and  leaves  you  to  judge  of  its  quality.  He  is  one  of 
the  few  writers  who  do  not  resort  to  generalizations 
to  conceal  their  poverty  in  invention." 

"If  you  please,  my  friend,"  said  the  skeptical 
Adrian,  "  what  became  of  Meredith's  power  of  inven- 
150 


tion  when  he  had  once  launched  so  fine  a  character  as 
Diana  Merion  ?  I  believe  that  he  broke  down  in  the 
middle  of  the  story.  From  Diana's  night-watch  to 
the  end  of  the  tale  is  a  disappointing  anti-climax." 
Then  Adrian  blew  fleecy  whirls  of  smoke  toward  the 
stainless  sky,  and  serenely  leaned  over  the  railing  and 
looked  out  to  the  far  horizon,  waiting  for  the  inevi 
table  explosion. 

Dupont  was  used  to  this  form  of  baiting.  It  was 
understood  between  them  that  if  they  travelled  to 
gether  they  must  disagree  about  everything  except 
the  itinerary  of  the  journey.  The  wise  Adrian  often 
said :  "  Imagine  two  people  whose  minds  are  in 
similar  grooves  starting  out  on  a  vacation  together  ! 
One  might  as  well  carry  a  mirror  for  company  and 
entertainment." 

"  You  know  you  are  unfair,  Adrian,"  said  Dupont, 
warming  up,  as  a  true  disciple.  "  You  persist  in 
belittling  a  great  writer  of  English  fiction  because 
his  vocabulary  worries  you.  But  there  is  Diana,  my 
boy,  from  the  first  page  to  the  last  a  creature  of  beauty 
and  variety,  and  more  charming  under  calumny  than 
other  women  whose  reputations  are  unassorted.  What 
you  call  the  anti-climax  of  the  story  is  the  most  sub 
tile  and  natural  development  of  a  complex  character. 
It  is  not  Diana  who  should  be  blamed  for  falling 
from  her  ideal,  but  a  rotten  social  system  which  forced 
her  into  a  false  position." 

"  You  assail  a  whole  class  of  society  in  order  to  praise 
a  woman  who  in  Egypt  would  have  been  a  Cleopatra. ' ' 


' '  That  is  too  severe.  Diana  was  what  Sir  Liikin 
called  her — « the  loyalest  woman  anywhere. '  He 
pictured  her  completely  in  one  of  his  brusque  sen 
tences  :  '  She's  man  and  woman  in  brains,  and  legged 
like  a  deer,  and  breasted  like  a  swan,  and  a  regular 
sheaf  of  arrows  in  her  eyes.  Her  one  error  was  that 
marriage  of  hers. '  ' 

tf  Sir  Lukin  and  you  have  pointed  the  way  to  her 
greatest  fault,"  said  Adrian.  "  If  she  had  been  the 
right  sort  of  woman  she  would  have  made  a  charm 
ing  husband  out  of  Warwick  instead  of  wrecking  his 
life.  He  had  the  stuff  of  an  English  gentleman  in 
him." 

"  He  had  inherited  the  prejudices  of  six  or  eight 
generations  of  social  prigs,  and  he  never  could  have 
appreciated  a  bright  and  starry  spirit  like  Diana.''1 

"  She  was  weak,  vain,  emotional,  and,  like  most 
women,  betrayed  the  first  important  secret  that  was 
entrusted  to  her,"  said  Adrian. 

"  She  was  sincere,  affectionate,  and  benevolent. 
She  tried  hard  to  make  a  bright  corner  in  a  cruel 
world  which  loves  falsehood  and  the  dark.  I'll  ad 
mit  she  failed,  wofully  and  disastrously;  but  on  a 
Christmas  Day  like  this,  when  your  altruism  ought  to 
come  to  the  surface,  you  should  give  credit  to  her 
idealism.  The  failure  of  such  a  woman  is  not  anti 
climax.  I  like  to  think  of  Tom  Redworth  as  the 
happiest  of  men  with  Diana  as  his  wife.  The  mis 
tletoe  hanging  to  that  tree  over  there  by  the  road 
side  calls  up  a  Christmas  picture  in  great  contrast  to 


this  fragrant,  flower -scented  place.  I  can  see  The 
Crossways  on  the  Downs,  covered  with  snow  —  a 
bleak  and  wintry  English  landscape.  But  beyond 
the  threshold  of  the  Crossways  you  enter  into  warmth, 
cheeriness,  good-fellowship.  The  rooms  are  decked 
with  mistletoe  and  holly ;  Emmy'' 's  godchild  is  danc 
ing  in  joy  before  a  tree  hung  with  the  treasures  of 
fairy-land ;  in  the  library  SirLukin,  Redworth,  Arthur 
Rhodes,  Whitmonby,  and  Harry  Wilmers  are  tossing 
wit  and  story  back  and  forth,  feathered  with  laughter. 
And  on  the  hearth  before  the  grate  kneels  Diana, 
with  the  '  first-fire  glow '  touching  her  features  as  it 
did  one  bleak  night,  years  ago.  Now,  as  then,  Red- 
worth  imagines  her  <  a  Madonna  on  an  old  black 
Spanish  canvas. '  She  is  holding  the  hand  of  a  sweet- 
faced  invalid,  who  rests  beside  her  in  an  easy-chair, 
and  I  believe  it  is  that  blessed  woman,  Emmy,  who 
still  serenely  lingers  '  on  the  dark  decline  of  the  un- 
illumined  verge  between  the  two  worlds.'  Outside, 
the  Christmas  bells  are  ringing." 

"  Come,  Dupont,  you  have  been  dreaming,"  said 
Adrian.  "  Those  are  the  chimes  in  the  old  tower  of 
Carmello  Mission,  brought  a  century  ago  from  Spain. 
Let  me  call  you  back  to  this  continent  with  these 
lines  of  Stevenson's  : 

"  '  Now  that  you  have  spelt  your  lesson,  lay  it  down  and  go  and 

play, 

Seeking  shells  and  seaweed  on  the  sands  of  Monterey  ; 
Watching  all  the  mighty  whalebones  lying  buried  by  the  breeze, 
Tiny  sandypipers,  and  the  huge  Pacific  Seas.'  " 

153 


A  CURE  FOR  THE  MALADY  OF  CLEVERNESS 

THERE  has  been  a  good  deal  of  moralizing  on  the 
1  death  of  Dr.  Holmes  as  closing  a  notable  period 
in  American  letters,  with  lamentations  over  the  pres 
ent  decadence  through  the  malady  of  "cleverness." 
The  young  men  who  are  writing  these  lamentations 
are  suffering  from  this  same  malady  of  cleverness 
themselves.  It  is  one  of  the  prerogatives  of  clever 
ness  to  "  sass  "  its  contemporaries — particularly  if 
they  are  American.  The  proper  thing  is  to  be  so 
civilized  that  you  appreciate  the  art  and  letters  of  all 
countries  except  your  own.  When  Dr.  Holmes  was 
young  he  became  one  of  a  coterie  of  other  young  men 
who  believed  in  their  country  and  in  themselves  and 
in  each  other.  Of  course  all  that  was  very  provincial 
from  our  point  of  view.  They  ought  to  have  spent 
their  youth  and  enthusiasm  in  telling  each  other  how 
very  crude  they  were ;  that  the  place  to  learn  to  write 
poetry  was  England,  and  fiction,  France.  Instead  of 
Longfellow's  writing  in  admiration  of  Hawthorne  in 
the  North  American  at  a  time  when  he  needed  praise, 
he  ought  to  have  pointed  out  how  very  narrow  and 
provincial  were  all  the  "  Twice-told  Tales,"  with  no 
154 


glimpse  in  them  of  anything  beyond  a  New  England 
village.  Longfellow  could  have  done  that  beautifully, 
for  he  had  been  "  abroad  "  and  knew  a  thing  or  two. 
But  all  of  those  young  men  believed  in  being  genuine 
American  writers  rather  than  imitation  foreign  ones. 
They  took  the  material  nearest  their  hands  and  hearts, 
and  made  the  most  of  it. 

When  you  get  down  to  the  bottom  of  it,  you'll 
probably  conclude  that  there  was  a  pretty  fine  moral 
quality  back  of  all  their  optimism  that  put  fire  into 
their  writings — and  that  was  "loyalty,"  a  virtue  of 
which  little  is  said  nowadays,  except  during  polit 
ical  campaigns.  It  used  to  mean  a  man  of  honest 
convictions  and  attachments  to  which  he  stuck 
through  evil  and  good  report.  It  gave  a  unity  and 
stability  to  his  career,  whether  he  was  a  mechanic  or  a 
poet.  There  was  and  is  a  steadying  quality  about 
loyalty  which  frees  a  man  from  a  host  of  unnecessary 
worries  and  apprehensions,  and  keeps  him  young  in 
spirit  and  enthusiasm. 

All  of  which  is  no  excuse  for  the  prejudices  of 
ignorance.  Holmes  and  his  contemporaries  were  men 
who  tried  to  know  something  of  the  best  that  was  be 
ing  done  in  the  world  ;  but  they  believed  in  applying 
that  knowledge  in  and/^r  America. 

There  is  one  thing  strongly  in  favor  of  the  clever 
young  men  of  to-day — and  that  is  their  health  of  body 
and  mind.  The  spread  of  college  and  amateur  ath 
letics  has  had  a  great  deal  to  clo  with  it.  A  large 
part  of  their  cynicism  is  simply  disgust  with  the  mor- 
155 


bid  introspection  of  the  school  of  American  writers 
which  prevailed  a  few  years  ago.  A  healthy  young 
man  is  likely  to  say  that  it  is  "all  rot  " — and  he  is 
pretty  nearly  right  about  it.  He  is  beginning  to 
write  some  books  to  please  himself,  and  they  are  full 
of  the  enthusiasm  of  health.  They  are,  perhaps,  a 
little  materialistic,  which  is  natural,  for  youth  is  ma 
terial  in  its  motives. 

A  good  healthy  organism  will  be  pleased  with  its 
surroundings,  or  at  least  see  what  is  good  in  them. 
By  and  by  these  healthy  young  writers  will  begin  to 
see  and  write  about  what  is  best  in  their  own  country  ; 
and  then  all  their  cynicism  will  vanish  like  a  mist. 
They  will  be  surprised  to  see  how  their  own  country 
men  will  buy  their  books,  and  talk  about  them.  For 
the  American  is  more  anxious  to  think  well  of  his 
country  than  the  American  newspaper  or  novelist  will 
permit  him  to  think. 


THE   PATRIOTIC  NOVEL 

THE  flags  were  flying  the  other  day  on  all  the  high 
1  buildings  in  the  city,  to  signify  that  it  was  the 
birthday  of  a  patriot.  It  was  a  beautiful  day,  and, 
as  the  flags  fluttered  against  the  blue,  solid  citizens 
raised  their  eyes  from  the  streets,  and  felt  a  little  tre 
mor  in  their  hearts,  especially  if  they  were  over  forty 
and  recalled  what  intense  emotions  the  flag  stood  for 
when  they  were  in  their  youth. 

But  the  bulk  of  the  people  on  the  streets  were  un 
der  thirty,  and  to  them  the  flag  is  a  symbol  of  merry 
makings — a  fetich  that  clubs  and  hotels  and  theatres 
display  on  days  that  are  devoted  to  pleasure.  They 
associate  it  somehow  with  picnics  of  the  John  J. 
O'Malley  Association,  which  is  organized  for  spoils  ; 
with  parades  of  grizzled  veterans  who,  the  cynical 
assert,  are  organized  for  pension  raids  ;  or,  with  the 
topmost  girl  in  the  closing  spectacle  of  a  ballet  or 
comic  opera. 

The  boy  from  the  country  has  still  another  associa 
tion  with  the  flag — the  rural  cemetery  where  a  score  or 
more  of  graves  are  marked  with  little  weather-stained 
flags  that   set   apart    the  resting-places  of  patriots. 
157 


Even  for  him  the  flag  stands  for  a  day  of  fun,  for  an 
incongruous  procession  where  marched  all  the  odd 
characters  of  the  village,  and  a  hay -wagon  covered 
with  bunting  in  which  rode  the  local  beauties,  gor 
geous  in  white  muslin  with  red  and  blue  sashes,  and 
carrying  wreaths  of  flowers. 

And  for  old  and  young  alike  who  read  the  papers 
there  is  somewhere  in  a  cranny  of  the  mind  a  well- 
defined  idea  that  the  flag  nowadays  is  a  symbol  of 
political  bluster,  and  that  the  modern  patriot  is  the 
man  who  goes  to  Congress  "  for  the  glory  of  the  old 
flag  and  an  appropriation." 

There  is  nothing  in  the  fiction  or  general  literature 
of  the  decade  to  counteract  this  decay  of  patriotism 
as  a  sentiment.  Indeed  the  men  of  judgment  and 
education  are  rather  afraid  of  the  sentimental  side  of 
it — it  has  been  associated  with  so  much  that  is  imprac 
tical,  wrong-headed,  and  hypocritical.  When  the 
patriot  creeps  into  our  fiction  at  all,  it  is  to  be  made 
fun  of,  to  be  shown  up  as  a  ludicrous  person,  or  a  rather 
awkward  knave.  Our  novelists  would  rather  analyze 
the  perturbations  of  the  heart  of  an  immature  girl,  or 
the  rascalities  of  a  "  gilded  youth,"  than  show  us  the 
development  of  the  character  of  a  really  patriotic 
man,  who  stands  in  his  community  for  integrity, 
fidelity,  enthusiasm  in  all  things  relating  to  his  coun 
try,  his  state,  his  own  town,  his  home.  He  is  not 
dead  by  any  means,  for  almost  every  hamlet  has  him 
in  some  stage  of  development.  He  stands  for  the 
best  Americanism,  and  the  encouraging  thing  is  that 

158 


he  has  the  respect  and  often  the  admiration  of  the 
community  in  which  he  lives.  That  is  strong  enough 
proof  that  the  country  at  large  knows  real  patriotism 
when  it  sees  it. 

But  surely  it  ought  to  be  in  our  fiction  !  French, 
German,  and  Italian  novels  are  permeated  with  it — 
for  their  novelists  realize  that  they  are  appealing  to 
the  strongest  passion,  but  one,  in  the  breast  of  man. 
Looked  at  merely  from  the  side  of  Art,  we  ought  to 
have  more  of  it,  for  it  is  inspiring,  elevating,  often 
dramatic. 

And  then  it  is  clean,  and  decent,  and  manly — and 
a  big-brained  man  can  feel  that  he  is  not  engaged  in 
the  work  of  a  "  woman-novelist  "  if  he  writes  a  really 
patriotic  novel. 


159 


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